Everyone knows the symbol for a dollar ($) and some keyboards can even produce the symbol for the British pound (£) and the Euro(€), maybe even the Japanese yen or Chinese yuan (¥).
But what is the international monetary symbol for India's rupee? Surely, since India is one of the world's strongest emerging economic powerhouses, we should know the sign for that nation's basic unit of wealth and commerce.
Don't worry — you're not alone if you don't know the rupee symbol. It didn't actually exist until Thursday.
Of course there had previously been the internationally recognized three-letter code INR, but that's just not the same thing as a symbol. And the simple abbreviation "R" had been used, but "Rs" could also refer to the currencies of Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
India wanted its own unique monetary symbol.
So now it's time to meet and greet the brand new rupee sign.
Looks a little like Harry Potter's lightning scar, doesn't it? Either that or the logo for a new import sports car. Or maybe even a windblown pine tree in a Tom Thomson painting.
The creation of the rupee sign began with an Indian government announcement on March 5, 2009, that a contest would be held to choose a symbol for the rupee.
About 3,000 designs were submitted and those were culled down to a short list of five.
In the end, cabinet picked the symbol you see above, designed by D. Udaya Kumar, a 32-year-old graphic design and typographer who had just completed his PhD on Tamil typography at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai and is now at IIT Guwahati.
Kumar describes his symbol as being an amalgam of the Devanagari "Ra" and the Roman capital "R" without the descending stem. The two cross strikes at the top of the symbol reference the Indian flag.
And just how much was Kumar rewarded for his creation? Rs 2.5 lakh. Since a lakh is 100,000, Kumar's fee was 250,000 rupees — a little more than $5,600 in Canadian dollars.
Now comes the hard part — getting people to use it. One company, Foradian Technologies, has come up a rupee font. It's now available for free download. Just browse "Rupee Foradian" to find it.
Only problem is it only works on computers where this font is installed — so it may or may not show up on your computer screen. The system this story is moving across the country on doesn't recognize the rupee sign — yet — which is why you are not seeing it in the body copy.
But it's just a matter of time until the rupee symbol is universally available and accepted. After all, the 21st Century belongs to the yuan and the rupee .
