A symbol makes a currency? Nah!

This is the symbol for the Indian Rupee--has been adopted by the Indian government, and will now work its way through various international bodies for acceptance and implementation worldwide.

The more important question is whether the Indian rupee will be accepted at, say, Tokyo's Narita Airport.  It is one thing to design a new symbol, it is another for the currency to be accepted outside India.  That will take a long time.

One commentator notes:

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.

Over at the WSJ is this observation:

The new symbol contains the Devanagari ‘Ra’ and the Roman capital ‘R’ without its upright leg. It’s hard to describe. It also looks like backward “c” suspended on a backslash with some railway tracks running through it. That help?

So, what does the Gray Lady has to add to this?

It was designed by D. Udaya Kumar, a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, who studied typography, scripts and ancient printing methods.

Where do some of the other currency symbols that we use often come from anyway? The American $?

When the United States adopted its own currency in 1785, it used Spanish money as its model—a deliberate "screw you" to the British. Scholars have since theorized that the $ sign evolved out of an abbreviation for peso: The plural for pesos was "p^s," which eventually became "ps," and then simply an "S" with a single stroke denoting the "p." One early instance of the $ symbol crops up in a letter written by the merchant Oliver Pollock in 1778. Pollock also uses the "ps" abbreviation, making the letter a bridge between the two. The double-line through the S variation is less easily explained. Some believe they represent the twin pillars of Gibraltar depicted on the Spanish coat of arms. Others say it's shorthand for the letter "U" superimposed over the letter "S"—for U.S.

Now you know!