Forex Currency Codes and Nicknames

Currency Pair ISO Codes

When trading Forex, currencies are not referred to by their full name. Instead, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) developed abbreviation codes for each currency.

Here are a few ISO Currency Codes

EUR = Euro Dollar
GBP = Great British Pound
USD = US Dollar
CHF = Swiss Franc
NZD = New Zealand Dollar
AUD = Australian Dollar
CAD = Canadian Dollar
JPY = Japanese Yen

Currency Pair Nicknames

Additionally, traders generally refer to currencies by their nicknames. For example, the US Dollar is known as the buck
or greenback. Well considering that dollar notes are green, it is easy to guess the origin of the term greenback.

But what about the word buck? The use of “buck” to mean “money” came about from the days when a deerskin was a common means of trade. According to snopes.com, “the term appears as early as 1748 in the journal of Conrad Weiser, who wrote, while traveling through Indian territory (in what is now Ohio) in 1748, ‘He has been robbed of the value of 300 Bucks.’ A hundred years later, with the deerskin no longer a significant unit of trade, use of the word “buck” had shifted to a more general reference to the dollar.”

The British Pound is commonly referred to as the cable or sterling, The term cable dates its origins to the 19th century when the exchange rate between the US Dollar and British Pound was transmitted over the transatlantic telegraph cable. Since that time the exchange rate has been referred to as the cable. The term cable can be used to refer to the exchange rate between the US Dollar and Pound, or it can be used to refer to the Pound by itself. The term British Pound sterling comes from the simple fact that a Pound coin originally weighed one troy pound of sterling silver.

The Canadian Dollar is referred to as the loonie. If you have ever visited Canada, you may recall the image of a loon, a water bird that resembles a duck, on the one-dollar coin. So Forex traders affectionately refer to the Canadian Dollar as the loonie.

The New Zealand Dollar also contains a reference to a bird and is often referred to as the kiwi. The kiwi bird is native to New Zealand and is depicted on the New Zealand $1 coin.

Other nicknames are just shorted forms of the currency name. For example, the Swiss Franc is called the swissy, the Australian Dollar is the aussie, and the Euro Dollar is simply called, the euro.

Currency Pairs Traded at ForexSignal.com

At ForexSignal.com, we trade the most liquid and highly traded currency pairs, often referred to as the Forex Majors. We send email and SMS buy and sell signals for the GBPUSD, EURUSD, USDCHF, USDCAD, AUDUSD, USDJPY and EURJPY pairs. We also send signals for these currency pairs directly to your trading account with our MT4 Trade Copier. We hope you’ll try us out and see for yourself what Forex traders all over the world have been talking about.