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A capital letter R with a stroke across its leg, heading a prescription.
Also known as: Rx, Recipe symbol, Retrograde symbol
℞ heads a medical prescription, marking what follows as the prescriber's instruction to the pharmacist. Its origin is genuinely unsettled: a contraction of the Latin recipe, or the astrological sign of Jupiter carried over from an older pharmacy. The same glyph is used in astrology to mark a planet as retrograde.
Heads a medical prescription, introducing the medicine and instructions the prescriber directs the pharmacist to dispense.
Contexts: Medicine
Encoded at U+211E in the Unicode Letterlike Symbols block as PRESCRIPTION TAKE.
Contexts: Software
Usually explained as a contraction of the Latin imperative recipe, meaning 'take'. A competing account derives it from the astrological sign of Jupiter, invoked over a preparation in older pharmacy. The historical record does not settle which is right.
Both accounts are long-standing and neither is established. The record states the disagreement rather than choosing the tidier story.
The same character marks a planet as retrograde in astrological charts — an unrelated use of the same glyph, not a shared meaning.
A capital letter R whose descending leg is crossed by a short diagonal stroke.
Both mark pharmacy: the bowl identifies the premises, the Rx heads the instruction dispensed there.