Commercial minus sign
Northern European form of minus sign
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The commercial minus sign (German: abzüglich, Swedish: med avdrag av) is a typographical and mathematical symbol used in commercial and financial documents in some European languages, in specific contexts.[1]
U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN
U+066A ٪ ARABIC PERCENT SIGN
| ⁒ | |
|---|---|
Commercial minus sign | |
| In Unicode | U+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN |
| Different from | |
| Different from | U+0025 % PERCENT SIGN U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN U+066A ٪ ARABIC PERCENT SIGN |
As a symbol for arithmetic negation
÷ being used as a sign of subtraction in this excerpt from an official Norwegian trading statement form called «Næringsoppgave 1» used for tax purposes.In some commercial and financial documents, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, the symbol ÷ was used to indicate subtraction or to denote a negative quantity.[2][3] [a] Because the ÷ symbol had already been encoded as U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN, the Unicode Consortium allocated the code point U+2052 to identify this (negation) meaning uniquely.[4] The representative glyph used in the Unicode standard resembles an italic form of that division sign,[5] the exact form of the symbol displayed is typeface (computer font) dependent. [1]
According to the Unicode Consortium, the symbol "may also be used as a dingbat to indicate correctness" and is "used in the Finno-Ugric Phonetic Alphabet to indicate a related borrowed form with different sound".[1][6]
Typographic variant
In Germany, the form ./. was used an alternative to the formal form of the symbol,[1] since this could be conveniently typed on a typewriter.
See also
- Obelus – Historical annotation mark or symbol – Predecessor of this variant
- Division sign – Mathematical symbol
- Plus and minus signs – Mathematical symbols (+ and −)
- Percent sign – Symbol for the fraction of a hundred
- Arabic percent sign ٪ (almost identical symbol except that the dots are squares rather than circles)
- Flourish of approval – Symbol for a correct response in the Netherlands.