What are the criterias for giving a currency a symbol?

now indian rupee got a symbol.only a few currencies in the world have symbols.is there any criteria for a currency to get a symbol.|||The name of the currency is widely used and referred in other country's economy and share/stock markets. Listing of Company's share in other country's share markets. As a barometer of economic growth and down turns and up turns becomes point of reference to institutions and systems and exchange centres in other countries. Then they must have an easy symbol to refer to in their computer systems. Our foreign currency earning has become tremendous and we have to have balance of trade accounts with almost all banks in the world. So for day to day accounting etc our Rupee should have a single letter symbol in world wide computer system.|||There is no criteria whatsoever.





Most early currency symbols simply originated as abbreviations that stood for the currency. In the U.K, it became customary to use a script from of L: £. The $ sign is used for both “dollar” and “peso” in various countries and is of debatable origin. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign .





Recently some governments have introduced new symbols for their own particular currency. That is the only criteria that is needed.





There is no monetary club of countries that use a symbol for their currency. The £ sign and ₤ sign were both used for the British pound and the Italian lira and also at times for other pound currencies, the $ sign was used for various dollar/taler and peso currencies, and the ¥ sign was a Latin letter symbol for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan. Only the new Euro sign € represents a unique currency of those mentioned by the Indian government.





But there are a number of other currency signs that are or were used for particular currencies. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_si… .





“Then they must have an easy symbol to refer to in their computer systems.”





Of course, many currencies don’t. To distinguish currencies in international monetary discussions one uses the ISO currency codes. See http://www.xe.com/iso4217.php . A Mexican types $ and does not distinguish from the US dollar or the Canadian dollar or the Australian dollar or other peso signs. Similarly the single character ₨ was already available to type for any rupee sign.





The Indian government, like any government, has the right to define any currency symbols it wishes. But why need they lie about currency symbols?|||Obviously there is not any kind of international criteria -- a country can do whatever it wants. However it would be foolish for some minor country to create some symbol that is not readily found on computers, no one else would pay any attention to it.|||it's a PR stunt by the government. Spending some money to get more foreigner familiar with the country and its currency, and to make own citizens proud of their country (so the vote for the current government)