Occasional Observations of Traveling Technology Coach

Wordwall.net is an interesting website I recently discovered that lets users create online interactive — widgets? puzzles? activities? — for students. It is super easy and has a clean interface. There are many other websites that do the same thing of course, but this one feels good to use.

Anywho, more interestingly is the types of alphanumeric symbols that users are allowed to enter as text (e.g., like “dingbats” or emojis).

For example, compare the wordwall.net currency symbols with the MacOS symbols

There are 25 wordwall.net symbols and 39 MacOS symbols. I recognize, like, four of them: dollars, cents, bitcoin?, British pound maybe? What are all the others? Mostly Asian currency I suspect…

But why be left in the dark? What I like about the Mac’s Show Emojis and Symbols symbol thing is that all the names of the symbols are actually given on the right column.

So, from left to right, here are the names of all the currencies in the MacOS list:

dollar, euro, yen, cent, pound, ruble, rupee, won;

Thai baht (not bitcoin!), Turkish lira, tugrik, peso, kip, hryvnia, naira;

Bengali rupee, Gujarati rupee, Tamil rupee, rial, Indian rupee, guarani, new shekel, colon;

dong, Khmer riel, cedi, cruzeiro, tenge, lira, austral, mill;

Euro-currency, French franc, Deutsch pfennig, peseta, drachma, livre tournois, spesmilo.

Ok. Admit that you also have not heard of 95% of those currencies. MacOS, you include the Turkish lira, but what about the Italian lira? Unless that is the lira without a country attached to it. Unless there is no lira anymore, what with euro and what not.

Spesmilo, anyone?