Discovery and Glyph

Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 and taken into astrological practice thereafter. Its glyph combines a circle and cross with a vertical stroke, one common form incorporating the letter H in honour of Herschel. That form comes from the French astronomer Jerome Lalande, who described his proposal in a letter to Herschel himself as "a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name," a rare case among the classical and near-classical planetary glyphs where the inventor's own explanation of the design survives directly rather than being reconstructed by later scholars.

Because Uranus was discovered too late to receive a sign in antiquity, and because its two competing glyphs, Lalande's monogram and the earlier platinum symbol combining the signs for iron and gold, continued to coexist rather than one simply replacing the other, Unicode eventually encoded both: the monogram form entered the standard with the rest of the astrological set in 1991, while the separate astronomical symbol for Uranus, closer to the platinum design, was added only in Unicode's sixth version in 2010, nearly two decades later. Uranus is consequently the only classical or near-classical planet with two formally distinct Unicode codepoints for its own sign, a small but telling trace, in the character-encoding standard itself, of a naming and symbol dispute that was never fully resolved between the astronomers and the astrologers who each kept the design that suited them.