It is often used in place of a symbol that is not present in the font in use; for example, in place of the Colón (₡). It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (NE), 135° (SE), 225°, (SW) and 315° (NW). It is slightly raised above the baseline. It is represented in Unicode as U+00A4 ¤ currency sign (HTML: ¤ ¤).

The currency sign was once a part of the Mac OS Roman character set, but Apple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign (€) in Mac OS 8.5. In non-Unicode Windows character sets, the euro sign was introduced as a new code point. In the Unicode character set, each of the two symbols has its own unique code point across all platforms.

The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish keyboards.