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A capital Y crossed by one or two horizontal strokes.
Also known as: Yuan sign, Renminbi symbol, Crossed Y
The yen sign marks the Japanese yen, and the same glyph is used for the Chinese yuan, where it is called the yuan sign.
Is used for the Chinese yuan as well, where the same glyph is read as the yuan sign — one character serving two currencies.
Context or a currency code (JPY, CNY) is what distinguishes them; the glyph alone does not.
China · Contexts: Software
Serves two currencies. The same double-barred Y stands for the Japanese yen and, in the single-bar form, for the Chinese yuan renminbi; where the distinction matters the ISO code — JPY or CNY — is used instead, because the glyph alone cannot carry it.
Contexts: Software
Appears where a backslash is expected on Japanese systems. The Japanese national character encoding put the yen sign at the code point ASCII uses for the backslash, so Japanese-localised software has historically displayed file paths with yen signs between the folder names — a rendering artefact rather than a currency.
Japan · From the 1970s national character sets · Contexts: History, Software
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Single-bar form
One crossbar rather than two, the usual rendering for the Chinese yuan.
A capital Y with one or two horizontal strokes across its stem.