Rupee
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Rupee. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a silver coin of India. The name is of considerable antiquity. Rupees of different values have been current in the various provinces of India. The rupee of the present day is rated at a shilling and four pence in English money. It is valued in United States gold at 32.4 cents. The accounts of India are kept in rupees. Roughly speaking, Indian values may be converted into American values by allowing three rupee to the dollar. One rupee equals sixteen annas. One hundred thousand rupees are a lac; 10,000,000 a crore. See Coin ; Money Rupert (1619-1682), a Bavarian prince. Prince Rupert was the son of Frederick V, king of Bavaria, and Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England. He was educated at Leyden, then the most celebrated university in Europe, and had military experience in the Thirty Years' War. When the Civil War broke out in England Prince Rupert held command in the army of his uncle, Charles I. He won the battle of Edgehill, but lost those of Marston Moor and Naseby. During the period of Cromwell's ascendency, he lived in Paris, carrying on scientific studies. He is credited with the invention of a brass alloy, known as prince's metal and of the glass bulb known in the laboratory as a Prince Rupert's drop. At the restoration of the Stuarts he returned with his cousin Charles II to England. He was one of the original members of the Royal Society of London; also the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company . Rupert's Land in Canada, now a part of the Northwest Territory , was named for him.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a silver coin in use in the British dominions in India, with corresponding ones of much inferior workmanship and variable value in the native states. Also a silver coin of India, worth normally, in United States money, 32.4c.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note that a rupee held sixteen annas is now history: India decimalised on 1 April 1957, dividing the rupee into 100 paise, and Pakistan and Ceylon followed within a few years. The silver went too — wartime debasement and then cupro-nickel and steel coinage left the modern rupee a base-metal and paper currency, and since 1993 its value floats rather than being fixed at Aiton's "shilling and four pence." Where he told readers to allow "three rupee to the dollar," the Indian rupee has traded in the region of 80 to 90 to the US dollar in recent years. The counting words survived the arithmetic: lakh (100,000) and crore (10,000,000) are still standard in Indian financial writing, and the rupee is also the currency of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Written for this edition, 2026.