Dollar sign $

• Symbol first, no space: $25, $9.99, $1,250.
• Don’t double up: “$25 dollars” says dollars twice. Write $25 or 25 dollars.
• Large round numbers: $1.5 million, $3 billion. AP and most news style use this form.
• Whole dollars: drop the .00 in running text: “The ticket costs $40.”
• Ranges: $10 to $20, or $10–$20; repeating the sign avoids confusion.
• Cents alone: 75 cents, 75¢ or $0.75. Never combine them as $0.75¢.

Other countries use $ too, including Canada, Australia and Mexico. When it matters, add a prefix or code: US$, CA$, A$, MX$, or USD, CAD, AUD and MXN after the amount.

• Excel and Google Sheets: $ locks a reference. $A$1 stays fixed when you copy a formula; A$1 locks only the row. In Excel on Windows, F4 cycles through the options.
• JavaScript: template literals insert values with ${price}, and $ is a valid character in variable names.
• PHP, Perl and shell scripts: variables start with $, as in $name or $HOME.
• Regular expressions: $ anchors a match to the end of a line.
• LaTeX: $ starts and ends inline math, so type \$ to print a dollar sign.

Some note-taking apps and websites with math support also treat a pair of $ signs as math, which is why two prices in one line can turn into a formula until you escape them.

• ＄ (fullwidth dollar sign) belongs to Chinese, Japanese and Korean fullwidth text.
• ﹩ (small dollar sign) is a compatibility character for East Asian typesetting.
• ¢ (cent sign) is one hundredth of a dollar.

Some fonts draw $ with two vertical strokes instead of one. Both are the same character; the extra stroke is a design choice, not a different currency.

The origin of the shape is debated. The most widely cited explanation traces it to handwritten abbreviations of the Spanish peso, the silver coin that circulated widely in the American colonies and gave the US dollar its model.