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In the early 19th century, the Danish currency was 1 daler (dollar) = 6 mark. 1 mark = 16 skilling (shillings).

The symbol for a mark was this:

enter image description here

Is this symbol available in Unicode?

EDIT

As promised in a comment to @Wolff, here is an example from Hans Christian Andersen's book "En digters Bazar" (from 1842). He explains that a Guilder is worth 5 Marks and 8 Shillings:

enter image description here

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  • Interesting question. I have never seen that symbol in my life. One hell of a complex symbol for a basic currency!
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 3, 2017 at 20:05
  • I have never seen this symbol either. And I am from Denmark, love typography and even collected danish coins when I was a kid! Gonna have to see if I can find an example somewhere. Maybe it was mainly used in financial tables and the like and not so much on coins and in books? I am curious about why you need the symbol ...
    – Wolff
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 16:07
  • @Wolff The symbol was used when writing amounts. The daler was, I think, simply abbreviated (Rdlr. for Rigsdaler or something), the Mark was specified with the above symbol, and the Skilling was indicated by an italic ß. I'll edit my text above to include an example from literature.
    – oz1cz
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 19:41
  • @oz1cz Rigsdaler is generally abbreviated rdl. in current Danish orthography; Ordbog over det danske sprog tells me that rd., rdr., and rdlr. have all been used as well previously.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 21:12

2 Answers 2

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The Nordic Mark Sign is U+20BB. The example is shown here: https://symbl.cc/en/20BB/

Your example looks like a different design, perhaps depending on the font?? Or perhaps the Danish version was different?

There are some fonts which have a glyph - but again these look like different designs. See those shown here: http://www.fontspace.com/unicode/char/20BB-nordic-mark-sign

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  • No its the mark that is 1/6th of a daler
    – joojaa
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 11:45
  • @joojaa You may be right, but is it the same symbol perhaps, but only with a different design? Or was the Danish mark different from the Nordic one? Were there different ways to write it perhaps that differed by country? Take for example the British pound "£" symbol often written or shown in old documents as ₤, or L (for Libra), there are many ways to write it, and many designs, but they were all ultimately versions of the same symbol
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 12:14
  • @BillyKerr, the discription in the Unicode standard does indeed say "early representation of the Mark currency used in Denmark and Norway", but I've never seen the symbol in the Unicode standard in actual use. However, as you point out, there could easily have been many different designs.
    – oz1cz
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 14:23
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    @oz1cz - OK, so looks like your main problem is going to be trying to find a font with that particular glyph. If you really want to use it, perhaps consider using a graphic instead, such as an SVG. Here's one I made using Inkscape just by auto tracing - if you want it feel free to use it filedropper.com/danishmark
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 15:02
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The character is encoded in the private use area of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) as  *U+F2F1 OLD FOURISH MARK SIGN (see the MUFI Character recomendation v4.0, pore specifically p.115 of this pdf). Note that this is private use character, so it can appear very differently on different fonts, you need a font which follows a recent version of the MUFI recommendation. This character  is encoded in Junicode.

Note that MUFI also has a similar sign (with one flourish less) encoded just before,  *U+F2F0 OLD MARK SIGN and the specification discusses the possible unification with the Unicode character ₻ U+20BB NORDIC MARK SIGN discussed by @BillyKerr in their answer.

Given the time previous encoding in Unicode of MUFI characters took, is that any progress towards the coding of these character(s) in Unicode will take several years.

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  • that is a great find!
    – Luciano
    Commented Jul 20, 2021 at 15:16
  • Very nice! Thank you!
    – oz1cz
    Commented Jul 21, 2021 at 11:12

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