The yen and yuan sign, ¥, is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Latin scripts. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example: ¥50, or JP¥50 and CN¥50 when disambiguation is needed. When writing in Japanese and Chinese, the Japanese kanji and Chinese character is written following the amount, for example in Japan, and or in China. History Japan After the institution of Japan’s New Currency Act, from 1871 through the early 20th century, the yen was either referred to (in documents printed in Latin script) by its full name yen, or abbreviated with a capital "Y". One of the earliest uses of can be found in J. Twizell Wawn’s "Japanese Municipal Government With an Account of the Administration of the City of Kobe", published in 1899. Usage of the sign increased in the early 20th century, primarily in Western English-speaking countries, but has also become commonly used in Japan as well. Code points The Unicode code point is . Additionally, there is a full width character, , at code point for use with wide fonts, especially East Asian fonts. There was no code-point for any ¥ symbol in the original (7-bit) US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned (allocated to the backslash (\) in ASCII) to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, the ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin 1") character set assigned code point to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding. In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, assigns code point to the Latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the backslash in ASCII and also subsequently in Unicode. The JIS X 0201 standard was widely adopted in Japan. Microsoft Windows Microsoft adopted the ISO code in Windows-1252 for the Americas and Western Europe but Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems use the code page 932 character encoding, which is a variant of Shift JIS. Hence, 0x5C is displayed as a yen sign in Japanese-locale fonts on Windows. It is nonetheless used wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character (for example, in C:¥) and as the general escape character (¥n). It is mapped onto the Unicode U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (i.e. backslash), while Unicode