Commercial minus sign

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Short description: Northern European form of minus sign
"⁒" redirects here. It is not to be confused with ⸓, ٪, or %.
⁒
Commercial minus sign
In UnicodeU+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN (HTML ⁒)
Different from
Different fromU+0025 % PERCENT SIGN
U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN
U+066A ٪ ARABIC PERCENT 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.[1]

As a symbol for arithmetic negation

A ÷ 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] [lower-alpha 1] Because the ÷ symbol had already been encoded as Template:Unichar2, 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 – Predecessor of this variant
  • Division sign – Mathematical symbol
  • Plus and minus signs – Mathematical symbols (+ and −)
  • Percent sign – Math symbol (%) (Parts per 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.

Notes

  1. ↑ The symbol : was used to denote division, as in 6:3=2.[4]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "General Punctuation". The Unicode® Standard, Version 17.0.0. Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium. 2025. https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf. 
  2. ↑ Johann Philipp Schellenberg (1812). Kaufmännische Arithmetik oder allgemeines Rechenbuch für Banquiers, Kaufleute, Manufakturisten, Fabrikanten und deren Zöglinge.. p. 211. https://archive.org/details/11739896bsb/page/n5/mode/2up. "Tara abgezogen werden sollen, wie viel wird der erhaltene Reils dann netto betragen? Antw. 42​7⁄8 Zentn. ÷ 8 Pfd., wie hier folgt:" 
  3. ↑ Leif Halvard Silli. "Commercial minus as italic variant of division sign in German and Scandinavian context". http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2014-January/000013.html. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Leif Halvard Silli. "Too narrowly defined: DIVISION SIGN & COLON". http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2012-m07/0053.html. 
  5. ↑ Leif Halvard Silli. "Commercial minus as italic variant of division sign in German and Scandinavian context". https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2014-m01/0018.html. 
  6. ↑ Lagercrantz, Eliel (1939). Lappischer Wortschatz. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. OCLC 7862244. "⁒ bezeichnet eine lautlich verschiedene aber stammverwandte Entlehnungsform, welche aus einer verschiedenen Mundart, Sprache oder Zeit herrühren kann."  reproduced in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2419. "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS". Unicode Consortium. p. 55. https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2419.pdf. 

de:Minuszeichen



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