The commercial minus sign (, ) 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 , 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". reproduced in
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 Predecessor of this variant
Arabic percent sign (almost identical symbol except that the dots are squares rather than circles) Flourish of approvalSymbol for a correct response in the Netherlands.
Notes
References
de:Minuszeichen