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.
As 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".
Typographic 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 ./."
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.
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