¥ is a currency sign

Currency sign

A currency sign is a graphic symbol used as a shorthand for a currency's name, especially in reference to amounts of money. They typically employ the first letter or character of the currency, sometimes with minor changes such as ligatures or overlaid vertical or horizontal bars...

 used by the Japanese yen

Japanese yen

The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar and the euro. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the U.S. dollar, the euro and the pound sterling...

 (JPY) and the Chinese yuan

Renminbi

The Renminbi is the official currency of the People's Republic of China . Renminbi is legal tender in mainland China, but not in Hong Kong or Macau. It is issued by the People's Bank of China, the monetary authority of the PRC...

 (CNY) currencies

Currency

In economics, currency refers to a generally accepted medium of exchange. These are usually the coins and banknotes of a particular government, which comprise the physical aspects of a nation's money supply...

. The symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a double stroke. The base unit of both currencies shared the same Chinese character

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

 (traditional Chinese:圓; simplified Chinese:圆; Shinjitai

Shinjitai

Shinjitai are the forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification...

:円) pronounced yuán in Mandarin Chinese  and en in Standard Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

. In China, the character was later abbreviated with the different character 元, which has the same pronunciation in Mandarin (but not in Japanese).

Code page 932

In the Japanese editions of Microsoft operating systems, the yen sign in code page 932

Code page 932

Code page 932 is Microsoft's extension of Shift JIS to include NEC special characters , NEC selection of IBM extensions , and IBM extensions . The coded character sets are JIS X0201:1997, JIS X0208:1997, and these extensions...

 character encoding has the same byte value as the backslash

Backslash

The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing. It was first introduced to computers in 1960 by Bob Bemer. Sometimes called a reverse solidus or a slosh, it is the mirror image of the common slash....

 in ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

. It is also used wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator

Path (computing)

A path, the general form of a filename or of a directory name, specifies a unique location in a file system. A path points to a file system location by following the directory tree hierarchy expressed in a string of characters in which path components, separated by a delimiting character, represent...

 character and the general escape character

Escape character

In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters...

, essentially making it a backslash with a yen sign look, a peculiarity that stems from JIS X 0201

JIS X 0201

JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969 , was the first Japanese character set to become widely used. It is either 7-bit encoding or 8-bit encoding, although 8-bit encoding is dominant for modern use...

.

Chinese IME

Under Chinese Pinyin

Pinyin

Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

 IMEs

Input method editor

An input method is an operating system component or program that allows any data, such as keyboard strokes or mouse movements, to be received as input. In this way users can enter characters and symbols not found on their input devices...

 such as those from Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 or Sogou.com, typing "$" displays the double-width character "￥", which is different from single-width "¥" used in Japanese IMEs.

Unicode

The Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 code point is .

Additionally, there is a double-width character (￥) at code point for use with wide fonts (esp. east Asian fonts).