Where Did The Pound & Dollar Sign Come From?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2024
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
List Of Currency Symbols: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currenc...
The Origin Of The Dollar Symbol: www.bbc.com/worklife/article/...
Where Did The Dollar Sign Come From?: www.history.com/news/where-di...
History Of The Pound Sign: www.bankofengland.co.uk/freed...
Pound Sign Origin: theculturetrip.com/europe/uni...
Dollar Sign Two Lines: www.quora.com/Why-does-the-do...
Dollar Sign History: www.britannica.com/money/doll...
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What currency symbol does your nation use?
€.
And it used to be a ƒ for a Dutch guilder. (Florijn)
$$$
Sadly there is no symbol for Swedish krona, only abbreviation; kr
$
Poland - złoty/zł/PLN
Złoty means "golden"
In Portuguese, pounds (both the currency and the mass unit) are still called “libras”. So for me the symbol and the abreviation lbs always made sense
Same in Spanish. Pound Sterling = Libra esterlina.
Same in Czech
@@BN.ja05 or French "livre"
Not just Portuguese, pretty much every romance language
Interestingly, "peso" means "weight" as well
So does Libra £..lb..♎
@@kathleenking47 which it how it's called in Spanish and Portuguese: libra esterlina.
The mentioned in the video German coin, well made of high quality silver, was also very popular in the Spanish Empire, the American Spanish colonies, that have silver but not currency, began to produce coins aspiring to the same quality (although at the beginning they were very roughly made and therefore easier to counterfeit) and weight, and call them Pesos, because they have the same weight in silver.
With times the coins made in Mexico and Perú became of high quality and began to circulate internationally.
Weight! Peso is the Spanish word for wait?!
Oops I think I swapped my weight/wait around. That’s what happens when you try to use US customary units in some situations and metric in others.
I think weight was used in calculating value at one point or another, so I get where this would come from
6:48 Minor correction - The United States, before gaining independence from Britain, was never referred to as "The United Colonies of America"
In fact, they were pretty much always only referred to as the Thirteen Colonies. This is because that's all they really were: thirteen relatively disconnected, autonomous colonies that were founded by different peoples, companies, and whoever else at different times. All of these colonies had wildly different goals and people making them up: some colonies in New England such as Massachussetts and Rhode Island tended to be made of religious sects that founded their own religious settlements in the New World. Other colonies like Virginia were founded under the Virginia Company, explicitly founded by the crown under James I specifically to colonize in the name of the United Kingdom. And others still, like Georgia, were founded as penal colonies for exiled British people to go (later this role would famously be taken up by Australia). This is further complicated by the British not being the only ones to colonize the area, as French, Dutch, and Spanish already had settlements in or near where British colonies were located in North America.
Right up until declaring independence, these colonies had always called themselves the Thirteen Colonies. When it came time to proclaim the existence of their new government, they rather haphazardly decided on the "United States of America." What's even more interesting about this is that it's actually the word "United" which seemed contentious, not "States" (you can tell because on the Declaration of Independence, "STATES OF AMERICA" is in big flourishing letters on the title, and the word "United" is comparatively tiny and miniscule). This is because, like said before, all of the colonies had radically different peoples and different goals, and the idea of them being united by a common cause was already a huge stretch (which is where much of the famous propaganda pieces of the time tried painting all colonists as fighting a common fight against British tyranny: "United We Stand, Divided We Fall" and such)
Came down here to say that.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it was England that twelve of the thirteen colonies were established under. Only Georgia was established during the period that the Kingdom of Great Britain existed. The United Kingdom would only exist after 1801.
Also, while it was never official, there was mention of the „United Colonies“ in correspondence between members of the Continental Congress and Army. Also, it’s a convenient term to refer to the Thirteen Colonies after 1775 with the definitive beginning of the American War of Independence.
Early on in the American Revolution, it wasn't even clear that the rebellion would be limited to the colonies that later formed the USA. The province of Nova Scotia (which includes the area that became New Brunswick) was potentially going to join the rebellion against the crown.
It was Thomas Paine who actually COINED the reference to "The United States of America."
Where and when he did is more than can be explained here offhand.
The US Dollar and various Pesos around the world are directly descended from the Spanish Dollar (aka Piece of Eight). The S could very well just be a vestigial reminder of the currency's Spanish origin or a corrupted symbol of its origins as a unit of 8 bits.
Or it might just stand for "Silver" or "Sterling."
The numismatic interpretation is that it originates from the pillars of Hercules, which appear on the piece of eight entwined with ribbon.
@@vulpo "Silver" seems unlikely as the Spanish word for silver is "Plata".
In a world before the Euro, you could just as well have included the Florin sign (ƒ) in this video. It used to represent the Dutch Guilder. The reasoning for this that, as a (heavily) alternative name for the Guilder, we used Florin.
Just in case anyone's curious, the Dutch names were *Nederlandse Gulden* and *Florijn* respectively.
INCONCEIVABLE!
In Romance languages, I believe it was universally called Florin. (Not 100% sure. At least in Spanish an Portuguese that was the case.)
@@gregorybrannan7202Florin, it’s a country across the sea. The sworn enemy of guilder.
@@JCCyC You are 100% correct. The only thing is that, in Portuguese, you'd write it with an M at the end: _Florim._ But, obviously, this little factoid is not widely known in the English speaking world.
Something similar is true for Pound (Sterling) : In most Romance languages, a word similar to the Latin "Libra" is used.
A florin was 2/ (shillings), or 24d. (pence)...
The spanish word "peso", refering to currency, actually comes from the latin 'pensum', which means "weight". Additionally, before the incorporation of the euro in Spain, they had the "peseta", which means "little weight", since it was a quarter of a peso.
If you ever come to Innsbruck, Austria, pay a visit to the coining museum at Münze Hall (Hall Mint) in the medieval town of Hall, neighbouring Innsbruck, which features a whole exhibition on the history of the Dollar.
The history of the Dollar name is even older. In the 15th century in Florence, the gold coin of Florence was minted, the Fiorino d'oro, or Florin (this is why the former Dutch currency was called Hollandse Florin). This coin became quite popular in the trans-alpine trade, and thus the Archduke of Tyrol, where new silver sources were discovered, started to mint a large silver coin that was supposed to have the same value as a florin. He went down in history as Sigismund the Rich in Coin. As they were thought to be equivalent to the Fiorino d'oro, they were called "like the golden one", gulden Groschen or Guldiner. That's why in German, the word for the former Dutch currency Florin is Gulden. As Tyrol was a part of the Habsburg Empire, the Guldiner was minted at all Habsburg silver mints, including the one in Joachimsthal, today's Jáchymov in Czechia, where the Joachimsthaler Guldengroschen was minted. Due to the length of the word, this got shortened to Joachimsthaler or just Thaler, which became synonymous with the largest regular silver coins, spoken and spelled Dollar by the Dutch traders, which brought the coin also to their colony Nieuw Amsterdam, which after the English conquest became New York.
As Spain was ruled by Habsburgs, they also started to mint Thalers after the conquest of Mexico and its rich silver mines. The large coins were called "piece of silver" or peso argento, hence the name peso for the currency, shortened to PS. Thus it was natural for North American accountants to write the PS ligature for pieces of silver, which due to the Dutch heritage were called Dollars in New York.
(As the ch in Joachimsthal comes behind an a, it's the kh sound, not the ch sound: Jo-Akhims-Thal. The name Joachim is the German rendering of the Hebrew name Jehoiakim, allegedly the father of the Virgin Mary.)
Ch is always pronounced as ch in standard German. Only some of those mountain dwellers down south dare to confuse it with a k from time to time.
@@Tokru86 But there are two ways to pronounce an ch, known as the ich and the ach sound. Joachimsthal uses the ach sound, not the ich sound as in the video.
As a side note: The mountain dwellers will confuse you even more, as they pronounce the k often as a ch as in Swiss German Chäs or how the natives pronounce Innschbruckch. The joke goes like this: How does someone from Innsbruck calls a banana? Banane-ch!
If you look at the pieces of eight, the Spanish dollar, a ribbon wraping around each pillar in an "S" shape similar to the dollar symbol we know today. The symbol was probably a shorthand way of symbolizing the ribbon around the pillars with a simple "S" stroke being the ribbon and a single vertical stroke through the center being the pillar. The variant of the two vertical strokes probably are to preserve the image of both pillars with the one ribbon wrapping both, as they appear on the Spanish dollar.
Simply showing a Spanish (or Mexican) Pillar Dollar in this video would have made the point obvious.
In Brazil since I can remember we have been using the $ after the abbreviation of the currency of the time. Since 1994 it has been R$, for "Real". But before that we have plenty, to accommodate the high inflation and money devaluation:
Cr$ Cruzeiro Real and Cruzeiro (we had many instances of Cruzeiro through the 20th century)
Ncz$ Cruzado Novo
Cz$ Cruzado
Ncr$ Cruzeiro Novo
I am going to be EXTREMELY nitpicky and note that the C's in NCr$ and NCz$ was uppercase.
@@JCCyC you are correct
Of all the currencies named peso, the Philippines is the only one with a unique symbol (₱) that was adopted by the American Commonwealth to ironically prevent confusion with the US Dollar.
And this "unique" symbol eventually spread to every other country that uses the peso as its currency and got adopted by those countries for the same reason, giving rise to the peso sign (₱) that is still used by every country using the peso as its currency to this day and is distinct from the dollar sign ($) used in countries that use the dollar as their currency.
In spanish we still call punds "libras esterlinas"
In italian we just use "sterline"
In English we call them pounds (pounds sterling if you want to be fancy)
And "livres" (or "livres Sterling") in French
In Romanian it's "lire sterline"
Fun facts: Ponds are called Libra in Portuguese and Spanish and Livre in French. The Pillars of Hercules theory is the one I knew for the $, there are Spanish coins with the $ emblem on them predating the pesos by centuries. There were other "Thalers", not just the Joachimsthaler. "Taler" (modern spelling) in German means "from the valley" and was a name used several times to refer to coins or bullion coins struck to utilize newly discovered silver mines (in valleys). Thalers were large silver coins, just a shade larger than silver dollars. Austria still issues Thalers, but only as a bouillon coin.
I've traveled around a bit, and I know what a few other currency symbols. In South Korea, where I live, and where the currency is the won, people either use the word won (원) at the end of the number value or put the symbol (₩) at the beginning of the number. In Malaysia, the currency is called ringgits. They just put the letters RM at the beginning of their prices. I can't remember what other countries do specifically, but it is still fascinating what other countries call their currencies and how they symbolize them.
"Currency symbols are the logograms we use most often in written language" Me when numbers are right there, which curency symbols almost always need:
Given the phrase: These eggs are £1 and this milk is £2. What's the more common symbol: 1, 2 or £?
The groceries costed £200 uses 0 twice
Before we adopted the Euro in the Netherlands, we had a two and a half guilders coin called a "Rijksdaalder" or imperial daalder (dollar).
In Japanese, the translation of 'pound' (as in currency or weight) is ポンド, or 'pondo'.
I always through it was a corruption of 'pound', but they were spot on all along!
0:42 _from what I can gather every modern currency on our planet has a shorthand symbol to represent it_
No, they don't. It's quite common to just use an abbreviation without special symbols, like "kr." for kroner or "zł" for złoty.
Like QAR or QR
Chf
Yeah, the guy's full of it, provides wrong info and has the audacity to ask for money at the end of the video.
AED or Dhs
Yes, and if you ignored all those smaller currencies, a more accurate statement would be: "every modern currency use one of 4 fixed symbols".
In czechia we don't have a logogram for our currency but an abbreviation.. It's just Kč (Koruna česká = Czech koruna).. maybe also since czechia dropped the circulation of hundreds (halíř - funnily enough etymologically related to the word dolar) we usually write bigger prices as i.e. 80,- as in 80 whole korunas and you don't need to use the denomination at all.. but in grocery stores where the hundredths are still used for counting we would use 80,90Kč.. also Joachimsthal (Jáchymov) is in Czechia and is also the place from where the Curries got their radioactive material!
The rupee is based on the devanagari ra character mixed with the latin R without the left hand line
If I had to listen to him ending words in an extra "-uh" for one more second...he's like an English valley girl.
artificial computer-generated voice? Sounds horrible!
That damn vocal fry too. Way too much
@@MrGPW79vocal fry is just a form of suprasegmental inflection people use
He even managed to insert an "ar" sound into the word "too".
@@neilgrundy time stamp please
I remember being taught that $ with a single line used to refer to the US Sterling dollar and $ with a double line referred to non-silver based US dollar that we use today.
"Every currency has its own unique symbol"
Wherever did you get that idea...? Romania's currency, the leu (plural lei, shorthand RON -- long story), doesn't have and to my knowledge has never had a logogram symbol 🤨
Really? If you see a sign in the shop that says 3 x 2
@@JosePineda-cy6om they write out "RON" on the sign, every time, just like USD or GBP. There's no symbol I've ever seen, I always assumed only a select few major world currencies had that privilege!
@@dancoroian1 This blows my mind!! Thanks for sharing!!
I'm sure when I was at school in the 1960s we used to write the pound sign with two horizontal lines instead of one.
I think the story of the dollar is a great analogy for the United States as a whole.
Early on, the United States didn't create a currency of their own, but were instead content to simply use the currency of their larger and more important neighbour, the Mexican Peso (or as the Americans called them, the Spanish Dollar). When it ultimately turned out that using your neighbour's currency is inconvenient, the US simply decides to make their own Pesos (which they refer to as US Dollars). These are not a new currency but just a domestic source for the currency. In fact, the Peso remains legal tender in the US, is fully interchangeable with the Dollar, and is the benchmark to which the dollar is pegged for decades.
The name is another story. A dollar is originally a German coin equivalent to 1/18 of pound silver, which replaced the shilling (1/20 pound) as the most popular subdivision of the pound in the Holy Roman Empire. This coin was, maybe by accident, maybe by design, similar to the Spanish 8 real coin. This lead to English and Dutch colonisers referring to the Spanish coin as the Spanish Dollar - a name that was much less common in Spanish language communities.
This borrowing, blending and naturalisation seems to me to be about the most appropriate currency the US could have.
And don’t forget in USA carpentry, we still call traditional nail sizes with a “d” - pronounced “penny”, as in 10d, ten penny nail. Supposedly, that was fixed as the cost of 100 nails of a given size during the time of K. Edward I. The letter “d” is from the Latin word for penny-denarius. Latin may be dead, but its ghost still walks among us.
In Armenia, we have the Armenian Dram with the symbol ֏ which is just a fancy letter Դ (Armenian "D")
In Armenia, computers are filled with money! (Only tech types will get the joke)
In Ireland, Scotland mostly, but also elsewhere, they use Dram as a unit of measurement too. It’s used to measure whiskey 🥃 and other spirits. Though there seems to be some confusion as to the exact amount of a dram. Some say it is 25ml and others have it as 35ml
@@JCCyC I have an intel computer
@@JCCyC Is this because AMD is the symbol for Armenian dollar, and coincidentally the name of a processor manufacturer?
@@carultch No, DRAM means Dynamic RAM, a typical computer's main memory.
10:44 Oh so THAT's the symbol of money, that's why I've seen them in many games but never give it a thought.
And it's the Troy Pound not pound used in commerce as precious metals are measured in Troy Pounds..
9:25 The ch in German is not pronounced that way. Its actually a voiceless palatal fricative. Also, it's "Yo-a-chims-tal-er".
Uvular, because it's after a
It should be anglicized as a kh, to avoid confusing it with ch as in Charlie.
The original Joachimstaler was minted in Jachymov, Bohemia. We call it tolar in Czech.
Yeah, though the name comes from the German name for the place (and was also used at that time). It was one of the cities historically settled mostly by Germans.
During the Colonial period, it was illegal in most circumstances to take gold or silver coins out of Britain, due to idiotic Mercantilist theory of the time. So Britain's colonies had to use low-value copper or bronze coins, or paper money, which nobody like at the time. However, Spain did use silver in their colonies, because that's where the mines were, so it was easier to make the coins there.
So most people in the British colonies preferred Spanish money. Since the Spanish peso was the same size as the Austrian thaler, the British called them Spanish dollars.
The peso at the time was actually designed to break apart into eight smaller pieces for change. Those pieces were called reals, but the British called them bits. That's why the US dollar can be called eight bits, even though there has never been a coin called a bit in US currency (it would be worth 12.5 cents, which would be kind of an awkward value). This is also why the old peso coins were called pieces of eight.
A slight quibble: “Libra pondo” means “a pound by weight” (ablative), not “a pound of weight” (genetive). Great video!
The former italian Lira was like £ but two lines instead of one.
The US dollar was also named and initially priced based on the Spanish Dollar, as in the Spanish empire's silver dollar coin which was scored to be divided into eight wedge pieces (pieces of eight, or _pesos_ ). A Spanish-American peso is 1/8 of a Spanish dollar, and that was the rough exchange rate between a Mexican peso and a US dollar for most of our shared history. For the Spanish to have themselves gotten the currency name from German is an amusing thing I didn't know before. American slang used to sometimes refer to a price of 12.5 cents or half a quarter as a "bit", which would be equal to a peso. This is the origin of the well known barber shop slogan _shave and a haircut, two bits!_ you've doubtlessly encountered in numerous 20th century cartoons.
Before the Euro was introduced, Germany had the "Deutsche Mark", which never had a single symbol to represent it. It was just "DM" for short. Given that it is still accepted by banks, you can still call it a "modern currency". As such, not all modern currency use a symbol. 😋
The pound weight used to measure the sterling silver used for the UK's currency was originally the Tower Pound, equal to 12 Tower Ounces, 7680 Tower Grains and 5,400 Troy grains. The Tower Grain was based on the weight of a single grain of wheat, later defined as exactly 45/64 Troy Grain (based on a the weight of a single grain of barley).
Henry VIII changed the standard of measurement in 1526 to the Troy Pound (5,760 Grains) - since 1959, 1 grain has been defined as exactly 64.79891 mg.
So 1 Troy Pound = 349.914114g. Currently, silver is trading at about £0.59/g, so a literal pound is worth about £206.45... nothing like devaluation over the years!
Did you notice you add an extra syllable to words at the ends of sentences?
Um, no. The dollar sign came from combining U and S, and they originally had two vertical, parallel lines, not the one line we have today. There may still be some old, mechanical typewriters with the older two-line dollar sign. Ditto for old teletypes.
The last theory you just mentioned at the end like it's no biggy is actually the most accepted one given that the US started by using Spanish coins and called them Spanish Thaller which evolved into Dollar.
I’ve got a good prompt for you if you haven’t done this one already: why do we address authors in the format of two or three initials, last name? Like HP Lovecraft or JRR Tolkien? How did we get there for authors specifically?
Personally, I think pounds come from eating too much during the holidays 😛
Holidays are for slugs after all.
True
That’s why pound cakes exist…
I'm pretty sure my BMI goes up a notch on Christmas Eve and another on Christmas Day lol
Dollars ain't even good for monopoly money 😊
Coming from the Philippines, we use Peso as our currency. I thought other peso currencies were using this sign "₱"
In German we write 20,50€
in English we write €20.50
In French too. I always write 20.50$ in English even though I know it's not right. I don't care and everybody understands me.
Since English-speaking countries have a history of placing the currency symbol before the number, they also place the Euro symbol before the number. The reason the USA does this, is that it used to be written with the dollars sign on the left, and the cents sign on the right. Eventually, the redundant cents sign was omitted. The UK did a similar thing with the pound sterling sign on the left, and the pence sign on the right.
In Portugal it varies a bit, but I (and most of us, I think) write as in Germany. It just doesn't make sense to write the currency before if it is said after... 🤔 (I also write "2kg", not "kg2".)
Also, I say "20 Euros", not "20 Euro". It's a plural amount, why keep the unit singular? (Again, I also say "2 metres" and "2 kilograms", not "2 metre" and "2 kilogram".)
I researched this myself a while back and what I found is; The Pound sign does indeed come from Libra Pondo. The pre-decimal 'Pound shilling and pence' was introduced by an Anglo-Saxon King called Offa in the 8th Century. He was king of the Kingdom of Mercia in what is now central England. But the interesting thing is that Offa was a contemporary of the famous Frankish (French we would say now) King CHARLEMAGNE who himself reformed the currency of his Carolingian Empire into the 'Livre Carolingienne' - which comes from the Latin LIVRE (from whence we get 'pound'). The Livre was based upon a unit of silver and was broken down into 20 Sous and 240 Deniers. EXACTLY the same as the old British pre-decimal Pound, shilling and pence. So the good old (pre-decimal) Pound is actually FRENCH! Who said England has never adopted a 'continental' monetary system?
And the explanation of the Dollar sign, in my view does indeed come from Joachimstahl, the town in Germany which produced very high quality coins, with high precious metal content (unlike many contemporaneous coins which had been somewhat debased at the time). As such, 'Joachimstahler' (shortened to 'stahler or dollar) coins were accepted in many different countries including the American colonies. Indeed the name Joachimstahl is derived from a term meaning 'The town of SAINT JOACHIM'. Originally Joachim was spelled not with a J but with an I. Therefore it was originally 'The town of SAINT IOACHIM'. I believe the most believable origin of the Dollar sign is therefore directly from the term 'SANCTUS IOACHIM' - 'Saint Ioachim' or Saint Joachim. THUS the overlay of the two initials I over the S of 'SANCTUS IOACHIM' or $.
I love the fact that the background music in this video is Money, money, money by Abba
Thanks for mentioning the Macau Pataca!
As a spanish speaker I always tought £ was pretty self explanatory because we often hear "pounds" being referred as "libras esterlinas", 24 years later and now I find out about all the confusion pounds create💀
Two thoughts: 1) The global spread of the dollar sign has less to do with US cultural impact and more to do with the US dollar being the global reserve currency. 2) Disparate symbols are needed because of the different values of currencies. Replacing all currency symbols with one symbol would cause chaos. We wouldn’t know which currency was being referred to without adding yet more description to clarify. Thus a unique symbol communicates lots of information efficiently.
I’d always heard the PS was short for Pound Sterling, not Peso.
The dollar sign is also the old rune for “scourge” (rolled about 45 degrees).
I always felt the meaning (scourge) might’ve been intentional, as money seemed to my young mind to be linked to something artificial… like it’s something tricky, maybe.
As someone from the UK, I miss European countries each having their own currency. People used to keep a few coins as reminders of wonderful holidays they had in those countries. It's not quite the same with Euros!
'Every modern currency has its own symbol'
The swiss franc is no more.
The reason why the “all currencies” sign isnt used or talked about much is that there is very little reason to every really use it. To represent a particular currency you wouldbt, and if you wanted to use it to symbolize wealth in general, a symbol more often associated with wealth, like a particular currency’s would do the job better because it has more day to day associations.
In Czech we call pounds libra (both weight and currency)
Peso -> PS -> Pound Sterling?
Macanese patacas has origins with the Spanish/Mexican dollar/peso thanks to the Portuguese trading with the Manila-Acapulco galleon routes, so it makes sense that they also use $ not to mention the Hong Kong dollar using $ as the HK$ is widely used in Macau at a 1:1 rate although its more common to just see the abbreviations "MOP" and "HKD" used in the end 🤷♂️
My introduction to the dollar sign as a kid was the TV game show The Price Is Right. That show has some nice classic (not classY) glitzy $.
Dollar
"monetary unit or standard of value in the U.S. and Canada," 1550s, daler, originally in English the name of a large, silver coin of varying value in the German states, from Low German daler, from German taler (1530s, later thaler), abbreviation of Joachimstaler, literally "(gulden) of Joachimstal," coin minted 1519 from silver from mine opened 1516 near Sankt Joachimsthal, town in Erzgebirge Mountains in northwest Bohemia. German Tal is cognate with English dale. The spelling had been modified to dollar by 1600.
The thaler was from 17c. the more-or-less standardized coin of northern Germany (as opposed to the southern gulden). It also served as a currency unit in Denmark and Sweden (and later was a unit of the German monetary union of 1857-73 equal to three marks).
English colonists in America used the word dollar from 1580s in reference to Spanish peso or "piece of eight," also a large silver coin of about the same fineness as the thaler. Due to extensive trade with the Spanish Indies and the proximity of Spanish colonies along the Gulf Coast, the Spanish dollar probably was the coin most familiar in the American colonies and the closest thing to a standard in all of them.
When the Revolution came, it had the added advantage of not being British. It was used in the government's records of public debt and expenditures, and the Continental Congress in 1786 adopted dollar as a unit when it set up the modern U.S. currency system, which was based on the suggestion of Gouverneur Morris (1782) as modified by Thomas Jefferson. None were circulated until 1794.
When William M. Evarts was Secretary of State he accompanied Lord Coleridge on an excursion to Mount Vernon. Coleridge remarked that he had heard it said that Washington, standing on the lawn, could throw a dollar clear across the Potomac. Mr. Evarts explained that a dollar would go further in those days than now. [Walsh]
- etymonlin.com
When thinking of New England (Northern Territories of the Crown before the "War of Independence") I think of Pound Sterling as the source of the US dollar symbol as well. Since it's another "PS" and I feel like it fits better.
Even if Pesos makes more sense.
Oh thank you! I have speculated on the fact that the Pound is both a currency and a weight measurement. But never got around to checking it out.
Now I had to find out what Sterling Silver means exactly. According to Wikipedia, it's a particular alloy of 92.5% Silver. The etymology is apparently murky.
10:42 This currency symbol actually appeared along with the pound symbol on the £ key on the keyboards of certain Acorn A-series computers in the 1990s.
I knew the pound symbol came from 'L' for libre, but Spanish Peso should have have occurred to me as I have known about peso de ocho, pieces of eight, two bits is a quarter from the habit of the American colonials using contraband Spanish silver dollars and the coins getting hacked up in halves, quarters and eighths. S for Spanish or silver or Spanish silver and the p decayed into a vertical slash
I read somewhere that in colonial times the British over stamped Spanish Pesos with a value in shillings and pence for local use.
I am surprised that you didn't mention at all the "SILVER DOLLAR". The US used to back up all it's currency with Silver and Gold and the Silver Dollar, much like the British Pound, was a pound of silver. Silver in English, not in Latin. Hence England was Libra, or the L symbol while S was in English for Silver. The Strike of the letter much like England's Pound, denotes as you mentioned, an abbreviated word. The answer was under you nose the whole time and you went on the deep end here.
I always thought that the £ sign was a ligature of S and T (for sterling) which took its from in the Libra "L".
The dollar's popularity comes from it being the currency of international trade. Countries keep stockpiles of USD for that trade which is why a lot of countries just accept American dollars as legal tender, either exclusively or alongside their own national tender.
Thats strange I was told when I was a kid that the £ symbol was an L and b which were once written on top of each other and then the b part became a line rather than a circle on the end of the L because people were lazy when they wrote it.
Where did the terms Buck and quid for dollars and pounds come from?
Buck came from buckskin being worth a dollar.
Quid came from the town of Quidhampton, the location of one of the of the royal mints in the UK.
And buck as another has said came from the North American Fur trade. At one time, a buckskin was sold by the trapper to a wholesaler for a dollar
@@rmar127 Thank you for the information about quid.
@@David-yw2lv The phrase "passing the buck" also comes from buck, as in male deer. But it has nothing to do with buck as slang for dollar. People would pass around a buck horn to identify whose turn it was to deal in poker games. When someone didn't want to be the dealer, they would secretly pass the buck horn to the next person. So it became an idiom for passing your responsibility to someone else.
@@carultch I never knew that.Thanks for the info.
I'm sure I've seen the universal currency symbol in a game before
it's surprising, i thought it just some random cool logo the developer came up with
The example at 7:12 looks like the symbol Ꞩ in some of its alternate forms (check the Wikipedia page for similar examples). That makes me curious if the original had a diagonal strike instead of vertical.
1:38 that is actually a peso symbol. The dollar symbol has two lines while the peso only has one
I remember in the fifth grade when I was tired during math class and I said just said that it was 5 money and null money in the math questions.
In Germany, pre Euro, the abbreviation "DM" was used for "deutsche Mark".
In Yemen YR for "Yemeni Rial" is used, or in Arabic "ر.ي"
I was wondering if there was a connection between the £ symbol and the lbs. abbreviation for pounds. Makes sense that they come from the Latin word.
Joachim is pronounced like the Spanish name Joaquin just with the sound ch, which is transcribed from Cyrillic scripts as kh.
So it's "yo akh him's tal". Or Jáchymov, as it is south of the border between the German state of Saxony and Czechia.
When it comes to the dollar and the sign, an as reasonable explanation, especially since the name comes from the Germanic/Nordic word daler, in Norway from 1560 to 1873 the currency was named: Speciedaler or spesidaler, shortened to SPD, again if you add them together you have $ sign with both lines. And that makes more sense to me then the middle letter in pesos, especially since the name of the currency is daler. You should research my theory.
Change the "Leave a super thanks" video from "Americans Shouldn’t Be Called American" to "How did the Countries of South America Get Their Names?" at the timestamp 9:36 RIGHT NOW and always use this new one from now on.
2:10 Ecuador had an official currency, the sucre, but it got so devaluated that it was basically worthless (even more than the Zimbabwean dollar), so it got phased out in the year 2000 at a rate of 25000 sucres per US$. They seem to have revived the name for a state-sanctioned cryptocrrency, though.
8:14 I was under the impression that the most accepted theory was that it was a stylization of the left column with a band with the word "plus" of the Spanish crest on the tails side of the peso duro/Spanish dollar/piece of eight from where all of those currencies stem.
8:36 and in most parts of the world; some even rebranded the coins to use as their own currency (just stamping an extra design in one of the sides), which is one of the several reasons behind Spain's economic collapse.
9:27 I had heard that the name "dollar" comes from a corruption of "duro" from "peso duro" (as explained before); it may very well be from "duro", from "thaler", a combination of the two or none of them.
Interesting. And I always thought the symbols for original UK money came from the Romans as Libra, Sestertius, and Denarius. Of course the s and d were dropped with decimalisation in the 70s.
I never found it strange for the pound symbol to be an L because in Spanish we call the British pound "Libra esterlina"
Joachimsthal is not in Germany, it's in the Czech Republic.
That explains why in the Portuguese speaking world call the Pound.... Libra.
In Spanish £ is still call "Libra Esterlina" and a lot of country use $ to represent pesos, "weight" in Spanish
I do know the USA “Borrowed” some of its coin denominations from other countries. Pennies are an old English denomination, Dime and nickel are borrowed, Quarter is possibly a USA invention.
In Czech, "pound" both the weight and the currency are called "libra"
In Dayton, Ohio, there is a Seibenthaler Rd. Sounds like "Seven Dollar Rd."
In Portuguese, we call the British money as Libra (Esterlina).
joachim is pronounced yo-ach-heem (with the german ch sound) not "yosheem"
And in general "Taler" is a German word for coin or currency. "Joachimsthal" means "Joachim valley" and is a place name. Then "of joachimsthal" in German is "Joachimsthaler" which then got abbreviated to just "Thaler". So a "Thaler" is a "(currency) of the valley"
A new theory; as a British colony there would have been trading with coin - and precious metals have an intrinsic value. Outside of gold, used in sovereigns and guineas, the most common precious metal was silver used in shilling and this multiples (old British coin divisions are LSD - pounds, shilling, and pence). The D could have been remarked with one or two letter I'd to mean shilling..?
Fuck auto correct - the S for shilling marked with an l or rwo.
precious metals don't have intrinsic value, the spanish learned this the hard way when they made silver completely worthless by mining so much of it
Ecuador is using USD and not authorized to print it. Your economy depends on another country's economy.
7:07 I guess using 1 instead of 2 vertical line in $ is user preference. It's easy with 1 line.
Just from the title and thumbnail, I've already know how the pound and dollar symbol were created.
oh wow ok didn't know this!
Dollar came from spanish that the two pillars are vertical strokes and S-like shape is ribbon. Pound came from black--letter
The Norwegian currency, Norwegian Kroner (NOK) does not have a symbol. In writing, the shortening “kr” is used instead of
I always wondered or assumed that the dollar symbol perhaps had its roots in shillings from the British system. However, that thought only resides in the dark corners of my own mind, and I doubt there is anything to substantiate that.
The $ symbol comes from the Spanish dollar, and that symbol comes from the Spanish coat of arms
The columns of hércules and Plus ultra.
The pound meaning I’d imagined because the lira the old Italian currency used the same symbol and it’s name is derived from libra
Interesting that you didn't mention the Portuguese Escudo (with the double-barred $ sign).
Would that mean that the Italian Lira is a diminutive of libre
and the symbol for Italian Lira was £.
The UK didn’t use the Euro because there is a difference between the European Union and the Eurozone (as well as the European Economic Area).