the number, e.g., "". (The cent symbol is written after the number in most countries that use it, e.g., "5¢".) Use in the Portuguese Empire In Portugal, Brazil, and other parts of the Portuguese Empire, the two-stroke variant of the sign (with the name ; () was used as the thousands separator of amounts in the national currency, the real (plural "réis", abbreviated "Rs."): meant "". This usage is attested in 1775, but may be older by a century or more. It is always written with two vertical lines: . It is the official sign of the Cape Verdean escudo (ISO 4217: CVE). In 1911 Portugal redefined the national currency as the escudo, worth , and divided into 100 ; but the cifrão continued to be used as the decimal separator, so that meant or 123 escudos and 50 centavos. This usage ended in 2002 when the country switched to the euro. (A similar scheme to use a letter symbol instead of a decimal point is used by the RKM code in electrical engineering since 1952.) Cape Verde, a republic and former Portuguese colony, similarly switched from the real to their local escudo and centavos in 1914, and retains the cifrão usage as decimals separator as of 2021. Local versions of the Portuguese escudo were for a time created also for other overseas colonies, including East Timor (1958–1975), Portuguese India (1958–1961), Angola (1914–1928 and 1958–1977), Mozambique (1914–1980), Portuguese Guinea (1914–1975), and São Tomé and Príncipe (1914–1977); presumably all using the cifrão as decimals separator. Brazil retained the real and the cifrão as thousands separator until 1942, when it switched to the Brazilian cruzeiro, with comma as the decimals separator. The dollar sign, officially with one stroke but often rendered with two, was retained as part of the currency symbol , so one would write for 13 cruzeiros and 50 centavos. It was formerly used by the Portuguese escudo (ISO: PTE) before its replacement by the euro and by the Portuguese Timor escudo (ISO: TPE) before its replacement by the Indonesian rupiah and the US dollar. In Portuguese and Cape Verdean usage, the is placed as a decimal point between the escudo and values. The name originates in the Arabic (), meaning 'zero'. One stroke vs. two strokes In some places and at some times, the one- and two-stroke variants have been used in the same contexts to distinguish between the