Indian rupee sign (₹)

How to read it

Unicode encodes it as INDIAN RUPEE SIGN (U+20B9), the official rupee currency sign for India. The Press Information Bureau of India describes it as an amalgamation of the Devanagari letter ‘Ra’ and the Roman ‘R’ without the stem. Its designer, D. Udaya Kumar, said it is based on the tricolour, with two lines at the top and white space in between. The government said the sign would standardise how the rupee is written in different languages, and tell it apart from the currencies of other countries also called rupee or rupiah, such as Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The ISO code is INR.

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The older rupee sign ₨

Unicode keeps a separate, older character, the rupee sign ₨ (U+20A8), which it describes as unofficial legacy practice in India, not formally tied to any particular currency, and equivalent to the letters Rs. Rupee is also the common name of currencies elsewhere in South Asia and of Indonesia’s rupiah, and Unicode notes that these are often abbreviated with Latin letters.

Where the word comes from

The Press Information Bureau traces the word rupee to the Sanskrit raupya, meaning silver. The silver rupee coin, the Rupayya, was introduced by the Afghan king Sher Shah Suri, who reigned from 1540 to 1545.