EDIT English synonyms sputnik, currency, louse
German synonyms Filzlaus, Ricardi-Sonne

 jb  : :  Mzajac 

EDIT Coin in the sun
The character is a general indicator for »currency«. It symbolizes a coin gleaming in the sun.

 84.167.150.62 

EDIT Spread
This character is probably one of the least used ones, although it is encoded as part of ISO-Latin 1 and therefore existent all over the world. It's even part of the special characters in many mobile phones, such as Nokia, and every type designer has to design it with each new font because of its being part of ISO-Latin 1.

 jsw 

EDIT History – a character of the cold war
The cold war didn't just influence politics but also typography.
When in the late 1960s the american ASCII-Code was to be turned into an international ISO-norm, the standard committees of several countries refused to let the american Dollar-character be part of ISO 646. So it was decided to create a character that was just a neutral symbol for »currency« instead of a specifically american character.

 jsw 

EDIT Informatics In Java and ICU, this symbol is used within Currency number patterns.

 srl295 

EDIT Depending on your system, localization and used software, some currency symbols like the Euro symbol might be converted to this character when using an automatic converter transforming into utf.

 91.89.107.41