Currency symbols for prices and price lists

$ is shared by over twenty currencies, among them the US, Canadian, Australian, Singapore and Hong Kong dollars and the Mexican peso. ¥ stands for both the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan. kr covers the Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic crowns, and £ is used for the pound sterling and several other pounds. Inside one country nobody is confused, but a shop selling abroad should add a prefix, as in US$ or A$, or use the three-letter code: USD, AUD, INR.

Those codes come from the international standard ISO 4217, and they never clash: JPY and CNY are both written ¥ but can’t be mixed up. In a casual caption they look stiff, so many sellers use the sign for local buyers and add the code in a pinned post or highlight for everyone else.

Placement follows the language you write in, not the currency. The same price can look like quite different numbers depending on who writes it.

Indian grouping is the one most likely to puzzle readers elsewhere. To someone who counts in thousands, ₹1,25,000 can look like a typo, so for an international post write ₹125,000 or “₹1.25 lakh”.

A phone can only draw a sign that its fonts include, and fonts often lag behind Unicode. Signs that have been around for decades are safe; the ones added recently are the likeliest to appear as empty boxes on phones that miss updates.

The signs in the last three rows are left out of the copy grid on purpose. They are, or are about to be, real characters, but many phones can’t draw them yet, so the codes KGS, SAR, AED and MVR are safer in a caption for now.

• ₹ was picked in 2010 through a public design competition. It blends the Devanagari letter र (ra) with the Latin capital R, and the two lines across the top are said to echo the Indian flag.
• € is based on the Greek letter epsilon, a nod to the first letter of Europe, crossed by two lines meant to stand for stability.
• £ is a stylised L for libra, the Latin word behind the pound as a unit of weight.
• ₠ looks like a euro but belongs to the ECU, the accounting unit that came before it. It has been in Unicode since 1991, seven years before the real € arrived.

• In English the sign sits against the number: ₹499, $25, £20. Letter abbreviations usually follow the number with a space, as in 450 kr.
• Choose one way of writing your currency and stick to it. “Rs 499” in a caption and “₹499” in the bio look careless side by side.
• If people keep commenting “price?”, the price isn’t easy enough to find. Put it in the first line of the caption or on the image itself.
• 💲 and 💰 are pictures that screen readers announce as “heavy dollar sign” and “money bag”. Use them as decoration and keep the real sign next to the number.
• There is no rupee banknote emoji. Banknote emoji exist only for the dollar 💵, euro 💶, pound 💷 and yen 💴, so Indian sellers tend to pair ₹ with 💰 or 💸.

Tip: A discount reads best with both prices: “₹999 → ₹699” tells a shopper more than “30% off” alone, and it needs no strikethrough, which Instagram captions don’t support.