Colon Sign

The Colon Sign at U+20A1 denotes the colón, a currency symbol used chiefly for Costa Rican money and historically associated with Salvadoran currency. It sits in the Currency Symbols block, alongside other specialized monetary signs rather than ordinary punctuation. In real-world use, it is most visible in Costa Rica for prices, invoices, menus, advertisements, accounting records, and banking interfaces. Amounts may be written with the sign before the number, as in ₡5,000 for five thousand Costa Rican colones, often with local thousands separators and decimal conventions. The symbol is also encountered in historical or archival material for the Salvadoran colón, which was replaced in everyday use by the US dollar in El Salvador. Because the glyph resembles a capital C with one or two vertical strokes depending on the font, plain text sometimes substitutes “CRC,” “colones,” or a simple C when the dedicated sign is unavailable or might be confused.