Random Currency Generator

How this random currency generator works

Press Generate and you get a country, its currency, and the three-letter code that banks use for it. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them all. The filters run before the draw: Starts with and Ends with compare a single character, and Contains matches anywhere.

Now the part that will change how you read a currency code forever, and it takes about a minute.

Every currency code is a sentence

USD is not an abbreviation of "US dollar". It is a formula.

Take the two-letter ISO code for the country. Add one letter for the money. That is the whole standard.

• USD is US for the United States, plus D for dollar.
• GBP is GB for Great Britain, plus P for pound.
• JPY is JP for Japan, plus Y for yen.
• CHF is CH for Switzerland, plus F for franc. And CH, as anyone who has bought a Swiss domain name knows, is short for Confoederatio Helvetica.
• NPR is NP for Nepal, plus R for rupee.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Every code splits down the same seam. AFN is Afghanistan plus afghani. DZD is Algeria, whose ISO code is DZ, plus dinar. The first two letters answer where, and the third answers what.

Ten pairs, so you can practise: Botswana pula (BWP), Chile peso (CLP), Georgia lari (GEL), Iceland króna (ISK), Malaysia ringgit (MYR), Mongolia tögrög (MNT), Peru sol (PEN), Poland złoty (PLN), Thailand baht (THB), Vietnam dong (VND).

The problem the code was invented to solve

Write "500 dollars" in a contract between an Australian company and a Canadian one and you have written nothing. Write "500 francs" anywhere and you have written less than nothing.

More than twenty countries use a currency called some kind of franc. Dozens use a dollar, dozens more a peso or a pound. Several use a dinar. The names were never unique, and until 1978 there was no agreed way to say which one you meant.

So the International Organization for Standardization published ISO 4217, and the naming problem went away overnight. AUD and CAD are different codes. There is nothing to argue about.

The standard also carries something most people never notice: how many decimal places each currency has. Most have two. The Japanese yen has none, because there is no coin smaller than a yen. The Kuwaiti dinar has three.

If you have ever wondered why a payment system stores money as integers, that is why. Somebody had to decide, for every currency on Earth, where the decimal point goes.

X means money that belongs to no country

Generate for long enough and you will hit three codes that break the pattern completely: XOF, XAF and XCD.

There is no country whose ISO code is XO, XA or XC. That is exactly the point.

ISO 3166 never assigns a country code beginning with X. The letter is set aside for private use. Which left ISO 4217 free to use X as a flag meaning "this money does not belong to a single country".

So eight West African countries share XOF, the West African CFA franc. Six Central African countries share XAF. Six Caribbean countries share XCD, the East Caribbean dollar.

The same X does other work. Gold is XAU, silver is XAG, platinum is XPT, palladium is XPD. Take the letter X and add the element's chemical symbol from the periodic table. One troy ounce, quoted as if it were money, because in a bank's ledger it is.

And two more, which are the strangest entries in the whole standard. XTS is reserved for testing, so that nobody accidentally moves real money while checking that a system works. XXX means a transaction involving no currency at all.

Somebody sat in a committee and decided the world needed an official code for nothing. They were right.

The euro broke the rule and got away with it

By its own logic the euro should be an X code. It belongs to no single country. It should have been something like XEU, which is in fact exactly what its predecessor, the European Currency Unit, was called.

Instead it is EUR.

To make that legal, the maintainers of ISO 3166 reserved the code element EU, which is not a country, specifically so that ISO 4217 could bolt an R onto it. The R is the third letter of the word euro.

In other words, a global standard was quietly bent because EUR is easier to remember than XEU.

Standards are written by people, and people want the euro to look like a currency rather than a commodity.

Countries that use somebody else's money

A currency is not a possession. Plenty of countries do not issue theirs.

Ecuador, El Salvador, Timor-Leste, Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands all use the United States dollar. Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu use the Australian dollar. Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc.

A few run two at once. Panama has its own balboa and uses the US dollar alongside it. Bhutan has the ngultrum and takes Indian rupees. Lesotho and Namibia both peg to the South African rand and accept it.

Which is why a currency is worth pairing with a country rather than listing alone. The pairing is the interesting part, and it is not always one to one.

Ways people actually use this

• Testing payment code. Generate twenty. If your system assumes two decimal places, the Japanese yen and the Kuwaiti dinar will find that out for you.
• Quizzes. Show the code, ask for the country. GBP is easy. CHF is not. XOF is a trick question and now you know why.
• Learning the split. Generate ten and cover the first two letters. You are left with the initial of the money, and you can usually guess the rest.
• Travel and budgeting. A country plus its currency name is the pair you actually need before you land.
• Building a currency dropdown. Real codes, correctly spelled, with the country attached.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type franc into Contains. Swiss, CFA, Comorian, Djiboutian and more come back. It is the single best demonstration of why the codes exist.
• Type (X into Contains to pull out every shared, countryless currency at once.
• Type (EUR) into Contains and you get the euro users, several of which are not in the eurozone and use it anyway.
• Starts with matches the country name, since that comes first in every entry. Use Contains to search by currency or code.

Questions people ask

What is ISO 4217?

The international standard that gives every currency a unique three-letter code. First published in 1978. It exists because the words dollar, franc, pound and peso were each being used by a dozen countries at once.

Why is the Swiss franc CHF and not SWF?

Because the first two letters are Switzerland's country code, CH, which comes from the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica. The F is for franc. The currency code follows the country code, and the country code follows the Latin.

What do currency codes starting with X mean?

That the money belongs to no single country. Shared currencies like the CFA francs, precious metals like gold, and special codes for testing and for no currency at all. ISO 3166 never gives a country a code beginning with X, which is what makes the letter safe to use this way.

Do cryptocurrencies have ISO codes?

No. Bitcoin is written BTC almost everywhere, but that is a convention among exchanges, not a code assigned under ISO 4217. The standard covers currencies and funds, and it has not admitted them.

Why does the Japanese yen have no decimal places?

Because it has no subunit in circulation. The standard records a minor unit for every currency, and for the yen that number is zero. The Kuwaiti dinar, at the other end, has three.

References

1. ISO 4217 currency codes
2. ISO 3166 country codes