The favourite story about the dollar sign — that it's a U stacked on an S for "United States" — is almost certainly folklore, appealing and false. The likeliest explanation, traced by the historian Florian Cajori through eighteenth-century business papers, is older than the United States itself: the mark grew out of the Spanish "peso," abbreviated "pˢ," whose looping P and superscript S gradually collapsed into a single S crossed by a stroke.
That heritage explains why the sign first anchored to the Spanish dollar, the silver coin that circulated widely across the early Americas, before the young republic adopted both the coin's name and its mark.
A detail people argue about is the number of strokes. You'll see the sign drawn with one vertical bar or two; both are historically legitimate, and Unicode encodes only a single character for it, leaving the stroke count entirely to the font. So whether your screen shows one line or two isn't a different symbol — it's the same codepoint, rendered to a designer's taste. Worth remembering before you go hunting for a separate "two-bar dollar" that doesn't exist as its own character in the standard.
About Dollar Sign
Dollar Sign is the Unicode character $ at codepoint U+0024 in the Basic Latin block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Dollar Sign
To use the Dollar Sign symbol ($) in HTML, insert the
entity $ directly into your markup. The decimal entity $ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\24';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u0024' evaluates to $. In Python source, write '\u0024'.
The character encodes to 24 as UTF-8 bytes and 0024 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 36.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.