Dollars and Cents

originally published on January 24, 2021

With my recent work on the Money Converter Problem Solver, I needed to manipulate money values and was again reminded of one of my pet peeves and that is the misuse of the cent symbol, ¢, which is underused and apparently misunderstood by many. One reason for its under use is the fact that it doesn’t show up on the standard American keyboard. You can enter the character, though, with the alt code alt-0162. I entered it above using its corresponding HTML entity character.

This symbol should be used to indicate the number of whole cents in a money value, such as 47¢ or 14¢ or 98¢, and so on. While it can be used for amounts equal to or greater than 100, it’s more efficient to use the dollar symbol, $ with the whole dollar amount and optionally the decimal point and two digits to indicate the hundredths of a dollar, as in $1.47. It could also be used for amounts less than one cent, but this is rarely needed.

Note that $1.47 = 1 whole dollar and 0.47 = 47/100 of another dollar, which is $1 + 47¢. It’s cool how the decimal part of the dollar amount (47) exactly equals the cents value (47), but, of course, this is not an accident. It is because there are exactly 100 cents in a dollar which makes the conversion simple in our decimal numeral system. If a different number of cents equaled a dollar, a more complex conversion would be required.

Now, where confusion apparently reigns is that folks will write something like .47¢ intending to convey the amount $0.47 = 47¢ but mixing up the two and indicating a value less than a penny. Indeed, any fractional amount of cents is less that a full cent (less than a penny). Many times I’ve seen things advertised, especially in grocery stores it seems, as a fractional number of cents and was tempted to take the item to the counter and give them a penny for it and tell them to keep the change!

To get it right, just remember to prepend the $ symbol for whole or fractional dollar amounts in any combination for any amounts greater or less than one dollar. (I like personally to use 0.47 instead of just .47 for amounts less than one.) For pure cents less than a hundred, use the ¢ symbol appended to the amount with no decimal point. In general, never mix decimal points and cent symbols because amounts less than one cent are very rare. I can’t think of any item that costs less than a penny, although gasoline is priced to include tenths of a cent, and it does add up.