Spesmilo
The spesmilo (pronounced [spesˈmilo], plural spesmiloj [spesˈmiloi̯]) is an obsolete decimal international currency, proposed in 1907 by René de Saussure and used before World War I by a few British and Swiss banks, primarily the Ĉekbanko Esperantista.
![](../I/1_Spesmilo.jpg.webp)
The spesmilo was equivalent to one thousand spesoj, and worth 0.733 grams (0.0259 oz) of pure gold (0.8 grams of 22 karat gold), which at the time was about one-half United States dollar, two shillings in Britain, one Russian ruble, or 2½ Swiss francs. On 19 January 2014, that quantity of gold would be worth about US$33,[1] £22 British pounds,[2] €24,[3] ₽2137 Russian rubles,[4] and SFr 29 Swiss francs.[5]
The basic unit, the speso (from Italian spesa or German Spesen;[6] spesmilo is Esperanto for "a thousand pennies"), was purposely made very small to avoid fractions: (on 19 January 2014) US$0.033, UK£0.022, Russia ₽2.137 and Switzerland SFr 0.029.
Sign
![](../I/Spesmilo_sign_(bold_italic).svg.png.webp)
The spesmilo character, called spesmilsigno in Esperanto, is a monogram of a cursive capital "S", from whose tail emerges an "m".[7] The currency sign is often typeset as the separate letters Sm.[8] The character has been assigned the Unicode code point U+20B7 ₷ SPESMILO SIGN (HTML ₷
)[9] and is included in Unicode version 5.2.[10]
Miscellaneous
References
- XE.com exchange rate XAU to USD. 19 January 2014.
- XE.com exchange rate XAU to GBP. 19 January 2014.
- XE.com exchange rate XAU to EUR. 19 January 2014.
- XE.com exchange rate XAU to RUB. 19 January 2014.
- XE.com exchange rate XAU to CHF. 19 January 2014.
- Cherpillod, André (2007). Konciza Etimologia Vortaro (in Esperanto). Universala Esperanto-Asocio. p. 432. ISBN 9789290170822.
- Proposal to encode the Esperanto SPESMILO SIGN in the UCS, by Michael Everson
- Esperanto and the Dream of a World Currency Archived 2007-09-26 at the Wayback Machine
- Proposed New Characters - Pipeline Table
- Andrew West, BabelStone: What's new in Unicode 5.2?
- Monopolo
External links
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Look up spesmilo in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |