2827: Peace Symbol ☮ Sep 16, 2024
The peace symbol, ☮, known also as the CND symbol, was made for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but even its creator did not give a single, clear answer after it was first displayed in 1958 to protest outside of the Nuclear Weapons Research Center in London. While he said that the symbol was supposed to be reminiscent of someone kneeling with his arms outstretched, his original explanation is that it comes from flag semaphore, specifically from the overlap of signals of someone making an N and a D, for “nuclear disarmament”. Ultimately, even if it was abstracted, that would possibly make this one of the last major uses of flag semaphore for any vaguely communicative or at least symbolic purpose in modern life.
2700: The Non-Roman Origins of Roman Numerals | May 12, 2024
Unlike other letter-based numerals that use the letters in ascending order of the alphabet, like Greek or Hebrew, Roman numerals are more abstracted, and somewhat systematic. For instance, X is 10, and take ½ of that for V (5), which is the top half of X. The X is probably derived from adding on an extra line at the end of a set in an early tally marks system. This works the same in M (1,000) and D (500), but not in the way that you might think.
These letters are not tied to words, though M was reinforced by Latin ‘mille’ for ‘thousand’, and the original form of M in numerals was ↀ, half of which is D. This originated in pre-Roman Etruscan numerals, that used C (100), IↃ (500), and CIↃ (1,000) and these bracketed-I forms then were written as similar looking letters, and C reinforced by ‘centum’. In fact, though not as typically used, other forms ↁ (10,000) and ↂ (50,000) exist from this system of adding brackets. The shapes of the letters, and some Latin words may have slightly influenced the form of Roman numerals as in the case of ↀ→M, but in almost all other cases (I,V,X,L,D) these symbols only coincidentally looked like letters and have nothing to do with the words they represented.
2699: The Currency Symbol Bars are Not as Old as You Think | May 11, 2024
It’s hard to miss the fact that currency symbols on every inhabited continent have a convention to write a letter with a slash through it, but this is actually a new standard. In the case of the two older currency symbols still in use that employ this, $ and £, in the case of the dollar is is incidental, as the symbol derived from a P over an S for ‘peso’, but in the case of the pound symbol, even the Bank of England doesn’t known the exact reason. It was originally simply 𝕷 ℒ or written lower case only getting the bar at the earliest in the 17th century, but the other predecimal sterling symbols (e.g. s and d) never got the bar.
This eventually became seen as standard practice in $ and £, spreading to other currencies, and many older currencies like the Russian ruble ₽ only got the bar later, in this case in 2013 via online polling, and even pre-Euro Dutch guilder ƒ or German mark ℳ︁ did not have this extra bar. Meanwhile, many currencies introduced in the 20th or 21st century do include this bar. This is especially true of places associated with the Spanish and British Empires, or America, but not the French or Dutch Empires for instance where the bar was never used, even where new currencies were invented.
While this bar is primarily seen on currencies in the Latin script even in areas with a different writing system like the Korean won ₩ or the Lao kip ₭, it also appears occasionally with other scripts, like the Ukrainian hryvnia ₴, Turkish lira ₺, Georgian lari ₾, or since 2010 the Indian rupee ₹. Most Arabic and native Southeast Asian scripts don’t add slashes to symbols, and just use abbreviations.
2682: The Symbol for Penny was d Apr 24, 2024
For over 50 years in Britain, the symbol for a penny is simply ‘p’, written at the end of a price like 99p, but before decimalisation in 1971, Brits would write out pence as ‘d’, also at the end. This pre-decimal system, which saw 20 shillings to the pound and 12 pence to the shilling, is often referred to as £sd or Lsd as an abbreviation of these units of sterling. For instance, something costing 7 shillings, and 9 pence might be written 7/9d. This raises the question of why ‘d’? Even the ‘s’ for shillings, not as commonly seen as the other two letters, only coincidentally had the same initial letter.
Rather, these abbreviations come from Latin, where ‘pounds’ is ‘librae’ (hence the L-based £ symbol), ‘shillings’ is ‘solidi’, and ‘pence’ is ‘denarii’ (all written in their plural form). These words are no longer used, but the word ‘denarius’ led to many other words for modern currencies, ranging from Serbia to Bahrain, or just money as in the Spanish ‘dinero’.
1988: Pound Signs: Both £ and # May 25, 2020
Both the £ and # symbols are known as pound signs, but not for the same things; the former is for the currency and the latter is for the weight. Still, despite their apparent vision they actually come from the same abbreviation. Both come as a quicker way to write the letters lb., themselves short for the Latin 'libra' meaning 'pound [weight]' or 'scale'. The use of # as a number sign only came about from computer coding.
Send your pounds, sterling or precious metal, to Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts to support this blog.
1017: £ Sep 21, 2017
The symbols for the currencies euro, €, ruble, ₱, won, ₩, and the yen and yuan, ¥, and many others including the no longer used Dutch florin, ƒ, are all at least partially based upon the first letter for the name of the currency, though the euro is also said to be from the Greek lunate epsilon, ϵ, as Greece is said to be the cradle of European civilization. Still, the dollar-sign, $ and the pound-sign, £—though the symbols are not arbitrary—do not appear as obvious necessarily. The £ comes from the first letter of the name for the currency as many others do, but in this case the name is from Latin, not the native language. The Latin word for 'pound', as in a weight or balance, was 'libra', related to other words from Romance languages like the French 'livre' of the same meaning, as well as the source of the abbreviation 'lb.' for pounds when referring to weight.