Reverse = R with line through it symbol.

[Chris Perkins]

I cannot reproduce it, but most of you would have seen the 'R' symbol with a short line through its tail to indicate 'Reverse' in older numismatic publications.

Where does this symbol come from, what is it called and when and why did it start being used as the abbreviation for the word 'Reverse' ? I can't seem to find it in character sets anywhere.

Spink still use it off and on, but most seem to have been replaced with a normal upper-case 'R' to denote 'Reverse'.

[Rob]

I would think it was first used in the late 19th century. Spink Circulars from the 1890s use it as did Montagu in the first edition of his copper book (1885). Auction catalogues seem to use obv and rev going back over 200 years irrespective of saleroom. Snelling (1762) uses reverse as does Ruding 1819-1840. None of the handful of references contemporary with Montagu that I have appear to use it. Hawkins in his various editions from 1841 -1887 doesn't, which suggests the 1880s as a guesstimate. Montagu was quite an influential character, so given he had just written 'the definitive reference' for copper, it is possible that he was responsible.

Not a clue as to its name or where it came from. I can see the sense in using a distinctive variation on the letter R due to its common use as an abbreviation for REX in legends.

[TomGoodheart]

Do you mean this Chris?



See here: http://www.theopticalvisionsite.com/glossary/eye-need-to-know-where-did-rx-come-from/#.VEKasctwbDc More commonly used in medical circles to represent "prescription".

Wikipedia has an entry under Medical prescription, which mentions the Unicode and HTML for the symbol, but I don't know how to get code to work in a post so had to link to the above image.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_prescription

As to it being used in numismatic circles, assuming we're talking about the same thing, I wasn't aware of that.
It doesn't appear in anything I have, though my literature only goes back to 1918.

A guess? Someone looked through available symbols and found the one closest to Rv

.

Edited October 18, 2014 by TomGoodheart

[Paulus]

Test R symbol

℞

Nope, no idea!

Edited October 18, 2014 by Paulus

[TomGoodheart]

℞ I used MS Word, typed in 211E and pressed Alt+X to get a symbol I could copy/paste.

.

Edited October 18, 2014 by TomGoodheart

[bagerap]

It means "take ye or take thus" and it's a form of shorthand from bastardised Late Latin recipere, the first line of a prescription.

This:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=U%2B211E&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=rcs&gfe_rd=cr&ei=-6JCVMGCKvOq8weBoYHYCw

may help with the Unicode.

[Chris Perkins]

Excellent, so it's a monogram of R and X. I may start using it in books from now on, I've always liked it.

The most similar I could find in my character set was the R with the x on the tail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_prescription#mediaviewer/File:Rx_symbol_border.svg

I wasn't sure if they were related. It seems they are.

[Peckris]

℞

(via my Mac's 'Character Viewer' - "Letterlike Symbols")