The sign is also used in several compound currency symbols, such as the Brazilian real (R$) and the United States dollar (US$): in local use, the nationality prefix is usually omitted.

The first occurrence in print is claimed to be from 1790s, by a Philadelphia printer Archibald Binny, creator of the Monticello typeface.

The dollar sign, alone or in combination with other glyphs, is or was used to denote several currencies with other names, including: In the United States, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Pacific Island nations, and English-speaking Canada, the sign is written before the number ("$5"), even though the word is written or spoken after it ("five dollars", "cinco pesos").

Cape Verde, a republic and former Portuguese colony, similarly switched from the real to their local escudo and centavos in 1914, and retains the cifrão usage as decimals separator as of 2021.

[28] In Portuguese and Cape Verdean usage, the cifrão is placed as a decimal point between the escudo and centavo values.

In some places and at some times, the one- and two-stroke variants have been used in the same contexts to distinguish between the U.S. dollar and other local currency, such as the former Portuguese escudo.

[26] However, such usage is not standardized, and the Unicode specification considers the two versions as graphic variants of the same symbol—a typeface design choice.

Indeed, dollar signs in the same digital document may be rendered with one or two strokes, if different computer fonts are used, but the underlying codepoint U+0024 (ASCII 3610) remains unchanged.

When a specific variant is not mandated by law or custom, the choice is usually a matter of expediency or aesthetic preference.

[26] Among others, the following fonts display a double-bar dollar sign for code point 0024:[citation needed] regular-weight Baskerville, Big Caslon, Bodoni MT, Garamond: ($) In LaTeX, with the textcomp package installed, the cifrão () can be input using the command \textdollaroldstyle.

Because of the continued lack of support in Unicode, a single bar dollar sign is frequently employed in its place even for official purposes.

The symbol is sometimes used derisively, in place of the letter S, to indicate greed or excess money such as in "Micro$oft", "Di$ney", "Chel$ea" and "GW$"; or supposed overt Americanisation as in "$ky".

The dollar sign is also used intentionally to stylize names such as A$AP Rocky, Ke$ha, and Ty Dolla $ign or words such as ¥€$.