Commercial minus sign
Northern European form of minus sign
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.
01As a symbol for arithmetic negation
In some commercial and financial documents, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, the symbol ÷ was used to indicate subtraction or to denote a negative quantity. Because the ÷ symbol had already been encoded as U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN, the Unicode Consortium allocated another code point (U+2052) to uniquely identify this (negation) usage. The representative glyph used in the Unicode standard resembles an italic form of that division sign; the exact form of the symbol displayed is typeface (computer font) dependent.
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".
02Typographic variant
In Germany, the form ./. was used an alternative to the formal form of the symbol, since this could be conveniently typed on a typewriter.
According the Unicode code charts, version 17, regarding this symbol, "a common glyph variant and fallback representation looks like ./."
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Commercial minus sign”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Skjermbilete 2012-11-03 kl. 02.48.36.png by Næringsoppgåva er eit offentleg skjema. Offentlege, norske skjema er i prinsippet frie. Sjølve skjermknipsen er eg sjølv ansvarleg for., Copyrighted free use
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