Using the Won Sign
The won sign is a capital W crossed by one or two horizontal bars, and it stands for the currency of both South Korea and North Korea. The name descends from the same East Asian word for "round" that gave the yen and the yuan their names, which is why the three signs share a family resemblance. Unicode placed it at U+20A9 in the currency block, separate from the Latin-1 signs, and that single fact accounts for most of the typing questions people have about it.
Placement
Korean price tags and English text about Korea put the sign before the number with no space: ₩5,000, ₩1,250,000. Korean prose spells it out after the figure instead, 5,000원, and you will never see the two combined. The won has no sub-unit in everyday use, so amounts are whole numbers with thousands separators. Because both Koreas use the same sign, financial writing prefers the ISO codes KRW and KPW whenever the distinction matters, or simply says South Korean won.
The backslash on Korean computers
Korean Windows systems inherited a code page in which the byte for the backslash is displayed as ₩. On such a machine, file paths read C:₩Users₩name and a programmer's escape sequences look like ₩n. The key still behaves as a backslash; only the picture changes. If you paste text from a Korean document into a spreadsheet and the currency sign turns into a slash, that is why, and the cure is to type the real U+20A9 character or use KRW.
Halfwidth or fullwidth
Korean input methods often produce the fullwidth ￦ at U+FFE6, which occupies the same square as a hangul syllable and lines up neatly in monospaced text. In chat and bios the difference is invisible, but in data it matters: a filter for ₩ ignores every ￦ row. Stick to the halfwidth sign in prices, and reserve the wide one for mixed Korean layouts where alignment is the point.
Typing and rendering
There is no Windows Alt code because the sign lies outside the old code pages; type 20A9 and press Alt + X in Word, or open the Win + . panel and look under Symbols. Korean keyboard layouts put ₩ on the backslash key. Macs have no shortcut by default, so the Character Viewer or a text replacement does the job, while iPhone and Android keyboards both list it in the long press on the dollar key beside the yen sign. Rendering is safe on any phone or computer from the last fifteen years; only some older embedded displays show a box.
The sign appears constantly in K-pop and K-drama fan bios, in "commissions from ₩" price lines and in travel captions, frequently mixed with the decorations on the aesthetic symbols page. The stylised alphabets on the aesthetic fonts generator do not include a fancy ₩, so keep it plain between the styled words.