Cent (monnaie)

The cent is a monetary unit of many national currencies that equals of the basic monetary unit. Etymologically, the word cent derives from the Latin centum meaning 'hundred'. The cent sign is commonly a simple minuscule (lower case) letter . In North America, the c is crossed by a diagonal stroke or a vertical line (depending on typeface), yielding the character . The United States one cent coin is generally known by the nickname "penny", alluding to the British coin and unit of that name. Australia ended production of their 1¢ coin in 1992, as did Canada in 2012. Some Eurozone countries ended production of the 1 euro cent coin, most recently Italy in 2018. The cent may be represented by the cent sign, written in various ways according to the national convention and font choice. Most commonly seen forms are a minuscule letter c crossed by a diagonal stroke or a vertical line or by a simple c, depending on the currency (see below). Cent amounts from 1 to 99 can be represented as one or two digits followed by the appropriate abbreviation (2¢, 5c, 75¢, 99c), or as a subdivision of the base unit ($0.75, €0.99) In some countries, longer abbreviations like "ct." are used. Languages that use other alphabets have their own abbreviations and conventions. The use of the cent symbol has largely fallen into disuse since the mid-20th century as inflation has resulted in very few things being priced in cents in any currency. It was included on US typewriter keyboards, but has not been adopted on computers. The cent sign appeared as the shift of the 6 key on American manual typewriters, but that position has been taken over by the freestanding circumflex on computer keyboards. The character (offset 162) can still be created in most common code pages, including Unicode and Windows-1252: On DOS- or Windows-based computers with a numeric keypad, can be held while typing or on the keypad. See for techniques involving the hexadecimal code point that can be used when there is no numeric keypad, as on many laptops.