Currency sign for the Russian ruble (?)
The
ruble sign
,
?
, is the
currency sign
used for the
Russian ruble
, the official
currency
of
Russia
. Its form is a
Cyrillic letter
Р
with an additional horizontal stroke.
[a]
The design was approved on 11 December 2013 after a public poll that took place a month earlier.
[1]
In
Russian orthography
, the sign almost always follows the number (the monetary value), and in many cases there is a space between the two. In
English orthography
, it usually precedes the number.
History
[
edit
]
In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a symbol for the Russian ruble consisting of lower case Cyrillic letters ? a rotated
р
on a
у
. In the 20th century
р.
was used to abbreviate the ruble.
The debates about adopting a national currency symbol for the Russian ruble began nearly from the start of
Russia's transition to a market economy
and its economic integration into the
global market
in the 1990s, soon after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union
. The idea was to reach the same level of recognition and therefore of influence as well-known
currency signs
such as
$
(the
US dollar
),
€
(the
euro
),
¥
(the
Chinese yuan
or the
Japanese yen
) and
£
(the
Pound sterling
). There were several contests to choose the ruble sign, hosted by different organizations. However, the
Central Bank of Russia
did not adopt one of the winning symbols from these early contests.
In 2007, a group of Russian design bureaus and studios proposed to use ?, the stroked Cyrillic letter Р to represent the ruble. Soon after, many electronic retailers, restaurants and cafes started to use the sign unofficially. It became very popular and was widely used as a
de facto
standard.
In November 2013, the
Central Bank of Russia
finally decided to adopt a national currency sign. It placed a public poll on its website with five pre-chosen options.
The design provided earlier by the design community that was informally yet widely used (?) was on the poll's list and got the most votes. On 11 December 2013, ? was approved as the official sign for the Russian Federation's ruble.
[1]
Coding
[
edit
]
The international three-letter code (according to
International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
standard
ISO 4217
) for the ruble is
RUB
. In
Unicode
, it is encoded at
U+20BD
₽
RUBLE SIGN
.
It can be entered on a
Russian computer keyboard
as
AltGr
+
8
on
Windows
and
Linux
, or
AltGr
+
Р
(Qwerty
?
+
H
position) on
macOS
.
Other uses of the symbol
[
edit
]
The cryptocurrency
Petro
, backed by government of
Venezuela
, uses the same symbol as the Ruble, although usually with a rounder upper part (
). A currency symbol used in the
Pokemon
media franchise is visually similar to the Ruble sign but instead has two strokes (
).
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
The cyrillic letter
Р
commonly represents the
alveolar trill
/r/
, roughly like the "rolled" sound like the Scottish pronunciation of ?r? in "cu
r
d".
References
[
edit
]