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1 Japanese Yen = .0099 US Dollar today

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YEN (yen)

1. A strong desire or inclination
2. A basic unit of currency in Japan
Common clues: Craving; Desire; Kyoto cash;
Longing; Hankering; It's tender to the Japanese; Itch; Japanese capital; Urge; Hunger; Yearning; Japanese money
Crossword puzzle frequency: 5 times a year
Frequency in English language: 10966 / 86800


Desire is a sense of longing for a person or object or hoping for an outcome. Desire is the fire that sets action aflame. The same sense is expressed by emotions such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the thought of the item or person, and they want to take actions to obtain their goal. The motivational aspect of desire has long been noted by philosophers; Hobbes (1588–1679) asserted that human desire is the fundamental motivation of all human action.




In Buddhism, for an individual to effect his or her liberation, the flow of sense-desire must be cut completely; however, while training, he or she must work with motivational processes based on skilfully applied desire. The Buddha stated, according to the early Buddhist scriptures, that monks should "generate desire" for the sake of fostering skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones.


While desires are often classified as emotions by laypersons, psychologists often describe desires as different from emotions; psychologists tend to argue that desires arise from bodily structures, such as the stomach's need for food, whereas emotions arise from a person's mental state. Marketing and advertising companies have used psychological research on how desire is stimulated to find more effective ways to induce consumers to buy a given product or service. While some advertising attempts to give buyers a sense of lack or wanting, other types of advertising create desire associating the product with desirable attributes, either by showing a celebrity or model with the product.


The theme of desire is at the core of the romance novel, which often create drama by showing cases where human desire is impeded by social conventions, class, or cultural barriers. As well, it is used in other literary genres, such as gothic novels such as Dracula by Bram Stoker, in which desire is mingled with fear and dread. Poets ranging from Homer to Toni Morrison have dealt with the themes of desire in their work. Just as desire is central to the written fiction genre of romance, it is the central theme of melodrama films, which use plots that appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience by showing "crises of human emotion, failed romance or friendship", in which desire is thwarted or unrequited.


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Yen is the currency used in Japan. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the United States Dollar and Euro. In Japanese it is usually pronounced "en", but the pronunciation "yen" is standard in English.



Japanese 10 yen coin (obverse) showing Byodoin Phoenix Hall


The yen was introduced by the Meiji government (Meiji 4) as a system resembling those in Europe; yen replaced the overly complex monetary system of the Edo Period. The New Currency Act of 1871 stipulated the adoption of the decimal accounting system of yen, and rin, with the coins being round and cast as in the West. (The sen and the rin were eventually taken out of circulation in 1954.) While not a unit of official currency, for large quantities of yen the abbreviation man (which means "ten thousand") is used, in the same way as values in the United States are often quoted or rounded off to thousands (given the yen's smaller value, it is much more common). The yen was legally defined as 0.8667 troy ounces (26.956 g) of silver, a definition that is still legally enforceable today. The Act also moved Japan onto the Gold Standard.

Yen literally means a "round object" in Japanese, as the Yuan in Chinese.



This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles "Yen" and “Desire”.