Ruble sign

Reference design for the Ruble sign used since 2013.

The ruble sign (₽, ) is the currency sign used for the Russian ruble, the official currency of Russia. It features the Cyrillic letter Р (R) with horizontal stroke. The design was approved on 11 December 2013 after a public poll that took place a month earlier. The international three-letter code (according to ISO standard ISO 4217) for the ruble is RUB. In Unicode it is encoded at U+20BD ₽ RUBLE SIGN (HTML ₽). In Russian, the sign usually follows the value, in English and other languages it precedes the value.

Backstory

The debates about adopting the national currency symbol for Russian ruble began nearly from the start of Russia's economy integration into the global market back in 1990's. The idea was to rival well-known signs such as $, ¥ and £. The number of supporters of this idea only grew after adopting the euro sign in 2002. There were several contests, hosted by different organizations in order to choose the sign, but nevertheless the Central Bank of Russia hasn't adopted the official law of currency symbol by that time.

In 2007 the initiative group of Russian design bureaus and studios proposed to use the stroked Cyrillic Р (R) letter (₽) to represent the ruble. Since then many electronic retailers alongside with restaurants and cafés started to use the sign unofficially. It became very popular and was wide used as a standard de facto.

Five final options in public poll on the webside of Central Bank of Russia

In November 2013 Central Bank of Russia finally decided to adopt the national currency sign and placed a public poll on its website with five prechosen options. Option, earlier provided by the design community also was included in the list and eventually took the most votes. On 11 December 2013 it was approved as official sign for the ruble.

1 Russian ruble coin from a special series featuring Ruble sign