Spesmilo
Obsolete decimal international currency
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.
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 (one-tenth of a pound sterling) in Britain, one Russian ruble, or 2+1⁄2 Swiss francs.
The basic unit, the speso (from Italian spesa or German Spesen; spesmilo is Esperanto for "a thousand pennies"), was purposely made very small to avoid fractions.
01Sign
The spesmilo sign, called spesmilsigno in Esperanto, is a monogram of a cursive capital "S", from whose tail emerges an "m". The currency sign is often typeset as the separate letters Sm.
In Unicode, the character is assigned U+20B7 ₷ SPESMILO SIGN in version 5.2.
02Miscellaneous
- The stelo was another currency unit used by the Universal League from 1942 to the 1990s.
- An Esperanto version of the board game Monopoly uses play money in denominations of spesmiloj.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Spesmilo”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- 1 Spesmilo.png by Thomas Nguyen PNG with Transparency: RedAuburn, CC BY-SA 4.0
- SpesmiloItalic.svg by SpesmiloItalic.png: User Kwamikagami on en.wikipedia derivative work: Omerzu, Public domain
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