This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a double stroke. The base unit of both currencies shared the same Chinese character (simplified Chinese: 圆; traditional Chinese: 圓; Shinjitai: 円) that means "circle". It is pronounced yuán in Mandarin Chinese and en in Standard Japanese. In mainland China, the Chinese character is more frequently written in everyday situations using the simpler character 元, which has the same pronunciation as the formal financial character 圆 in Chinese (but not in Japanese).

The Unicode code point is U+00A5 ¥ yen sign (HTML: ¥ ¥).

Additionally, there is a double-width character (￥) at code point U+FFE5 ￥ fullwidth yen sign (HTML: ￥ In the block "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms") for use with wide fonts, especially east Asian fonts.