The Turkish lira sign (symbol: ₺; image: ) is the currency symbol used for the Turkish lira, the official currency of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. The design was presented to the public on March 1, 2012. The international three-letter code (according to ISO 4217) is TRY.
In May 2012, Unicode decided the encoding of U+20BA ₺ TURKISH LIRA SIGN (HTML ₺
) and it was included in Unicode 6.2 released in September 2012. It was the only character addition in version 6.2. On Microsoft Windows operating systems, when using Turkish-Q or Turkish-F keyboard layouts, it can be typed with the combination AltGr+T.
In order to improve the recognizability of the Turkish currency and to show its strength in a broad manner, it was decided to create a new symbol. For this purpose, a design contest was organized on September 8, 2011, by the Central Bank of Turkey.
The design created by Tülay Lale was endorsed after a country-wide competition. It was chosen as the winner from a shortlist of seven submissions to the board of the Central Bank, selected from a total of 8,362 entries. The symbol resembles the first letter of the Turkish monetary unit L in the form of a half anchor with double stroke. With reference to "safe haven" notion in finance, the anchor depicts strength and confidence, and the upward-inclined double bar the steadily rising value of the currency and the Turkish economy.