The ₩ currency mark shared by both the South Korean won (KRW) and the North Korean won (KPW), one Unicode character for two states that aren’t on speaking terms. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The won sign (₩) is a rare kind of currency symbol: a single Unicode character (U+20A9, added back in Unicode 1.1 in 1993) that officially stands for two separate national currencies at once. Both the South Korean won (code KRW) and the North Korean won (KPW) are written with the identical ₩ glyph, a capital “W” crossed by a horizontal stroke, even though the two governments have been divided since 1948 and their wons trade at wildly different values. The name is old: the won was introduced under the Korean Empire in 1902, replacing the yang, and it comes from the hanja 圓 (원), meaning “round”, the very same root behind Japan’s yen and China’s yuan, all three descended from the round Spanish-American silver dollar that dominated East Asian trade for generations. One symbol, two countries, and a shared etymology stretching across the region.
The mark itself: a capital W with a horizontal bar through the middle. U+20A9 is the standard sign for almost every context; the fullwidth version is a compatibility character that lines up with the fixed grid of Korean and other CJK text.
The same ₩ denotes both the South Korean won (KRW) and the North Korean won (KPW): two currencies from two states that split in 1948 and remain, technically, at war. In Korean the unit is written 원 in Hangul. Nothing about the symbol distinguishes the two; only the three-letter currency code does.
Won, yen, and yuan are linguistic cousins: all three trace back to the character 圓 (simplified to 元 in modern China), meaning “round,” after the round silver dollars that once circulated across Asia. Japan’s yen and China’s yuan even share a single symbol, ¥, which is part of why non-native readers occasionally confuse ₩ and ¥ at a glance.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter →A browsable set of world currency marks, from the dollar and euro to the rupee and bitcoin.
The won’s East Asian cousin: same “round” etymology, and the ¥ glyph non-native readers sometimes mix up with ₩.
The Spanish-American silver dollar that seeded the won, yen, and yuan is also the coin most often credited with the $ sign’s own origin.