Spesmilo

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The Spesmilo (IPA: [spesmilo]) is an obsolete decimal international currency, proposed in 1907 by René de Saussure and used before the First World War by a few British and Swiss banks, primarily the Ĉekbanko esperantista.

The spesmilo was equivalent to one thousand spesoj, and worth 0.733 grams of gold, which at the time was about one-half United States dollar, one Russian ruble, or 2½ Swiss francs.

The basic unit, the speso (from Latin spes, "hope". spesmilo is Esperanto for "a thousand of spesoj"), was purposely made very small to avoid fractions.

Contents

[edit] The Spesmilo sign

Sm
Sm

The Sm character, called Spesmilsigno in Esperanto, is a monogram of a cursive capital "S", from the tail of which emerges an "m".[1] The currency sign is often typeset as the separate letters Sm.[2] The character has been assigned the Unicode codepoint U+20B7[3] and was approved for eventual inclusion in Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646.[4]

[edit] See also

  • The stelo was another currency unit used by the Universala Ligo from 1942 to the 1990s.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Proposal to encode the Esperanto SPESMILO SIGN in the UCS, by Michael Everson
  2. ^ Esperanto and the Dream of a World Currency
  3. ^ Proposed New Characters - Pipeline Table
  4. ^ BabelStone: What's new in Unicode 5.2?

[edit] External links

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