Currency symbol

Usage

When writing currency amounts, the location of the symbol varies by language. For currencies in English-speaking countries and in most of Latin America, the symbol is placed before the amount, as in . In most other countries, including many in Europe and Francophone Canada, the symbol is placed after the amount, as in . Exceptionally, the symbol for the Cape Verdean escudo (like the now-lapsed Portuguese escudo, to which it was formerly pegged) is placed in the decimal separator position, as in .

Design

Older currency symbols have evolved slowly, often from previous currencies. The modern dollar and peso symbols originated from the mark employed to denote the Spanish dollar, whereas the pound and lira symbols evolved from the letter L (written until the seventeenth century in blackletter type as \mathfrak{L}) standing for libra, a Roman pound of silver.

Newly invented currencies and currencies adopting new symbols have symbolism meaningful to their adopter. For example, the euro sign is based on , an archaic form of the Greek epsilon, to represent Europe; the Indian rupee sign is a blend of the Latin letter 'R' with the Devanagari letter (ra); and the Russian Ruble sign is based on (the Cyrillic capital letter 'er').

There are other considerations, such as how the symbol is rendered on computers and typesetting. For a new symbol to be used, its glyphs needs to be added to computer fonts and keyboard mappings already in widespread use, and keyboard layouts need to be altered or shortcuts added to type the new symbol. For example, the European Commission was criticized for not considering how the euro sign would need to be customized to work in different fonts. The original design was also exceptionally wide. These two factors have led to most type foundries designing customized versions that match the 'look and feel' of the font to which it is to be added, often with reduced width.

List of currency symbols currently in use

Rupee symbols by language

List of historical currency symbols

Some of these symbols may not display correctly.

The Unicode CJK Compatibility block contains several square versions of the names of currencies in Japanese katakana. They are intended for compatibility with earlier character sets.

Notes

References

References

1. "Moedas". Banco de Cabo Verde..
2. Kinnaird, Lawrence. (July 1976). "The Western Fringe of Revolution". The Western Historical Quarterly.
3. "The Origins of £sd". The Royal Mint Museum.
4. "European Commission – Economic and Financial Affairs – How to use the euro name and symbol". Ec.europa.eu.
5. "Currency Symbol for Indian Rupee".
6. "Currency Geeks Rejoice, Russia Has A New Symbol For The Rouble". [[Business Insider]].
7. Westcott, K. (2009) [https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7923825.stm India seeks rupee status symbol] , [[BBC]] 10 March 2009, accessed 1 September 2009
8. Everson, Michael. (2017-10-22). "N4787R2: Proposal to encode the Wancho script".
9. (2012-07-24). "L2/12-242: Proposal for one historic currency character, MARK SIGN".
10. "Bengali Code Chart, Range: 0980–09FF". The Unicode Standard.
11. Pandey, Anshuman. (2007-05-21). "L2/07-192: Proposal to Encode the Ganda Currency Mark for Bengali in the BMP of the UCS".
12. Everson, Michael. (2015-12-19). "L2/15-338: Proposal to encode four N'Ko characters in the BMP of the UCS".
13. Pandey, Anshuman. (2015-11-05). "L2/15-121R2: Proposal to Encode Indic Siyaq Numbers".