Commercial minus sign
Northern European form of minus sign
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.
“Commercial minus sign” enters the record as northern European form of minus sign. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Commercial, minus and sign can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56319311. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2052.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commercial minus sign” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.