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.