Talk:¤

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Latest comment: 9 years ago by Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV in topic RFV discussion: September 2013–June 2014
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If this is really called louse and sputnik, it should be mentioned at those entries. I couldn't find anything at a very brief glance on Google Books. Equinox 20:06, 7 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

RFV discussion: September 2013–June 2014[edit]

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This symbol was invented as a placeholder for the dollar sign in text encodings that had to be acceptable in non-dollar-using countries. It’s very nature means that it is unuseful. Has it ever been used (as opposed to merely being defined in glossaries and references)? Michael Z. 2013-09-12 21:59 z

I have a vague feeling that it was used in RISC OS (i.e. as something that would be presented to the user in some situations — perhaps currency-related), but can't remember any details... Or maybe not: all I can find by searching is that that slot was sometimes used for the (then new and unassigned) euro sign. Equinox 01:18, 13 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
Google and Bing refuse to search for it at all. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/03/15/1885864.aspx offers some hints about places where it's been used; maybe a 80s-era book on BASIC from Sweden or Russia might have it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:45, 13 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
We can leave this on RfV for two months, since it resists searching.
The challenge is finding uses of this term (symbol), rather than merely mentions or definitions of it, since it is merely a placeholder. It might be used as a placeholder character for a different currency symbol in unpublished text, which would be difficult enough to cite, but I think it might be only a placeholder in the encoding tables, in which case it is probably not a term at all. Note that the cited terms lorem ipsum and etaoin shrdlu are names of placeholders – the names for this symbol are louse and sputnik, not ¤.
Don’t mistake text encoding or rendering errors for uses. If a writer was using a font that displayed a rouble, or yuan, or euro symbol, and expected his audience to see the same, that is the use of a particular code point, but not of this symbol. Also, uses in programming languages are not in any wt:CFI#Natural languages, and so do not count for inclusion in Wiktionary. Michael Z. 2013-09-17 15:14 z
If you have any citations that a writer used this, please show us. Otherwise, let's not speculate that a writer accidentally used this in absence of evidence.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:21, 17 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
Does the symbol have a name? DCDuring TALK 13:05, 18 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
It is the old IBM international currency sign. It is used in Java as a placeholder for the current currency symbol when formatting a number: —Stephen (Talk) 13:29, 18 September 2013 (UTC)Reply
AFAIR, it's not "a placeholder for the dollar sign", because for the dollar sign one would use $. In some countries (ehmm, UK)  was IIRC used for the national currency, but they switched to # (which seems to link to Wiktionary:Main Page, see Unsupported titles/Number sign). --80.114.178.7 00:48, 13 October 2013 (UTC)Reply
Failed. — Ungoliant (falai) 02:49, 5 June 2014 (UTC)Reply