This article is about the name used for currencies. For the currency used in the United States of America, seeUnited States dollar. For other uses, seeDollar (disambiguation).
Sierra Leone: TheSierra Leonean dollar was used from 1791 to 1805. It was subdivided into 100 cents and was issued by theSierra Leone Company. The dollar was pegged to sterling at a rate of 1 dollar = 4 shillings 2 pence.
Spain: theSpanish dollar was used from 1497 to 1868. It is closely related to the dollars (Spanish dollar was used in the US until 1857) andeuros used today.[clarification needed]
On 15 January 1520, theKingdom of Bohemia began minting coins from silver mined locally inJoachimsthal and marked on reverse with theBohemian lion. The coins were namedJoachimsthaler after the town, becoming shortened in common usage tothaler ortaler. The town's name is derived fromSaint Joachim, coupled with the German wordThal (Tal in modern spelling), which means 'valley' (cf. the English termdale); the coin is thus "from the valley of [St] Joachim".[11]
This name found its way into other languages, for example:[12]
In contrast to other languages which adopted the second part of wordjoachimsthaler, the first part found its way intoRussian language and becameefimok [ru],yefimok (ефимок).[13]
The predecessor of the Joachimsthaler was theGuldengroschen orGuldiner which was a largesilvercoin originally minted inTirol in 1486 and introduced into theDuchy of Saxony in 1500. The King of Bohemia wanted a similar silver coin, which became the Joachimsthaler.
TheSpanish dollar, natively called Peso, was the main coin of the Spanish Empire. This coin is from 1739.
The Joachimsthaler of the 16th century was succeeded by the longer-livedReichsthaler of theHoly Roman Empire, used from the 16th to 19th centuries. The Netherlands also introduced its own dollars in the 16th century: the Burgundian Cross Thaler (Bourgondrische Kruisdaalder), the German-inspiredRijksdaalder, and the Dutch lion dollar (leeuwendaalder). The latter coin was used for Dutch trade in the Middle East, in the Dutch East Indies and West Indies, and in theThirteen Colonies of North America.[14]
The sign is first attested in business correspondence in the 1770s as ascribal abbreviation "ps", referring to the Spanish Americanpeso,[20][21] that is, the "Spanish dollar" as it was known in British North America. These late 18th- and early 19th-century manuscripts show that thes gradually came to be written over thep developing a close equivalent to the "$" mark, and this new symbol was retained to refer to the American dollar as well, once this currency was adopted in 1785 by the United States.[22][23][24][25][26]
By the time of theAmerican Revolution, the Spanish dólar gained significance because they backed paper money authorized by the individual colonies and theContinental Congress.[16] Because Britain deliberately withheld hard currency from the American colonies, virtually all the non-token coinage in circulation was Spanish (and to a much lesser extent French and Dutch) silver, obtained via illegal but widespread commerce with the West Indies. Common in the Thirteen Colonies, Spanish dólar were evenlegal tender in one colony,Virginia.
On 2 April 1792, U.S.Secretary of the TreasuryAlexander Hamilton reported to Congress the precise amount of silver found inSpanish dollar coins in common use in the states. As a result, theUnited States dollar was defined[27] as a unit of pure silver weighing 371 4/16th grains (24.057 grams), or 416 grains of standard silver (standard silver being defined as 371.25/416 in silver, and balance in alloy).[28] It was specified that the "money of account" of the United States should be expressed in those same "dollars" or parts thereof. Additionally, all lesser-denomination coins were defined as percentages of the dollar coin, such that a half-dollar was to contain half as much silver as a dollar, quarter-dollars would contain one-fourth as much, and so on.
In an act passed in January 1837, the dollar's weight was reduced to 412.5 grains and alloy at 90% silver, resulting in the same fine silver content of 371.25 grains. On 21 February 1853, the quantity of silver in the lesser coins was reduced, with the effect that their denominations no longer represented their silver content relative to dollar coins.
Various acts have subsequently been passed affecting the amount and type of metal in U.S. coins, so that today there is no legal definition of the term "dollar" to be found in U.S. statute.[29][30][31] Currently the closest thing[clarification needed] to a definition is found in United States Code Title 31, Section 5116, paragraph b, subsection 2: "The Secretary [of the Treasury] shall sell silver under conditions the Secretary considers appropriate for at least $1.292929292 a fine troy ounce."
Silver was mostly removed from U.S. coinage by 1965 and the dollar became a free-floatingfiat money without a commodity backing defined in terms of real gold or silver. TheUS Mint continues to make silver $1-denomination coins, but these are not intended for general circulation.
The quantity of silver chosen in 1792 to correspond to one dollar, namely, 371.25 grains of pure silver, is very close to thegeometric mean of onetroy pound and onepennyweight. In what follows, "dollar" will be used as a unit of mass. A troy pound being 5760grains and a pennyweight being 240 times smaller, or 24 grains, the geometric mean is, to the nearest hundredth, 371.81 grains. This means that the ratio of a pound to a dollar (15.52) roughly equals the ratio of a dollar to a pennyweight (15.47). These ratios are also very close to the ratio of a gram to a grain: 15.43. Finally, in the United States, the ratio of the value of gold to the value of silver in the period from 1792 to 1873 averaged to about 15.5, being 15 from 1792 to 1834 and around 16 from 1834 to 1873. This is also nearly the value of the gold to silver ratio determined by Isaac Newton in 1717.[32]
That these three ratios are all approximately equal has some interesting consequences. Let the gold to silver ratio be exactly 15.5. Then a pennyweight of gold, that is 24 grains of gold, is nearly equal in value to a dollar of silver (1 dwt of gold = $1.002 of silver). Second, a dollar of gold is nearly equal in value to a pound of silver ($1 of gold = 5754 3/8 grains of silver = 0.999 Lb of silver). Third, the number of grains in a dollar (371.25) roughly equals the number of grams in a troy pound (373.24).
There are two quotes in the plays ofWilliam Shakespeare referring to dollars as money. Coins known as "thistle dollars" were in use inScotland during the 16th and 17th centuries,[33] and use of the English word, and perhaps even the use of the coin, may have begun at theUniversity of St Andrews.[34] This might be supported by a reference to the sum of "ten thousand dollars" inMacbeth (act I, scene II) (ananachronism because the realMacbeth, upon whom the play was based, lived in the 11th century). In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" bySir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1891, an Englishman posing as a London beggar describes the shillings and pounds he collected as dollars.[citation needed]
In 1804, a British five-shilling piece, orcrown, was sometimes called "dollar". It was anoverstruck Spanish eightreal coin (the famous "piece of eight"), the original of which was known as a Spanish dollar. Large numbers of these eight-real coins were captured during theNapoleonic Wars, hence their re-use by theBank of England. They remained in use until 1811.[35][36] DuringWorld War II, when the U.S. dollar was (approximately) valued at five shillings, the half crown (2s 6d) acquired the nickname "half dollar" or "half a dollar" in the UK.
Chinese demand for silver in the 19th and early 20th centuries led several countries, notably the United Kingdom, United States andJapan, to minttrade dollars, which were often of slightly different weights from comparable domestic coinage. Silver dollars reaching China (whether Spanish, trade, or other) were often stamped with Chinese characters known as "chop marks", which indicated that that particular coin had been assayed by a well-known merchant and deemed genuine.
Prior to 1873, the silver dollar circulated in many parts of the world, with a value in relation to the British goldsovereign of roughly $1 = 4s 2d (21p approx). As a result of the decision of the German Empire to stop minting silverthaler coins in 1871, in the wake of theFranco-Prussian War, the worldwide price of silver began to fall.[37] This resulted in the U.S.Coinage Act (1873) which put the United States onto a 'de facto' gold standard.Canada andNewfoundland were already on the gold standard, and the result was that the value of the dollar in North America increased in relation to silver dollars being used elsewhere, particularlyLatin America and theFar East. By1900, value of silver dollars had fallen to 50 percent of gold dollars. Following the abandonment of the gold standard by Canada in 1931, theCanadian dollar began to drift away from parity with the U.S. dollar. It returned to parity a few times, but since the end of theBretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that was agreed to in 1944, the Canadian dollar has been floating against the U.S. dollar. The silver dollars of Latin America andSouth East Asia began to diverge from each other as well during the course of the 20th century. TheStraits dollar adopted a gold exchange standard in 1906 after it had been forced to rise in value against other silver dollars in the region. Hence, by 1935, when China andHong Kong came off thesilver standard, the Straits dollar was worth 2s 4d (11.5p approx)sterling, whereas theHong Kong dollar was worth only 1s 3d sterling (6p approx).
^Although called Panamanian balboas, US dollars circulate as official currency, since there are no Balboa bills, only coins that are the same size, weight and value as their US counterparts.
^Welcome to Jáchymov: the Czech town that invented the dollar. The tiny town of Jáchymov was just named one of Unesco's newest World Heritage sites Five hundred years after coining the first dollar, a tiny mining town is coming to grips with the many ways it shaped the modern world. bbc.com.
^abJulian, R.W. (2007). "All About the Dollar". Numismatist: 41.{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal= (help)
^Cross, Bill (2012).Dollar Default: How the Federal Reserve and the Government Betrayed Your Trust. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. pp. 17–18.ISBN9781475261080.
^Arthur S. Aiton and Benjamin W. Wheeler (May 1931). "The First American Mint",The Hispanic American Historical Review11(2), 198 and note 2 on 198.JSTOR2506275
^Riesco Terrero, Ángel (1983).Diccionario de abreviaturas hispanas de los siglos XIII al XVIII: Con un apendice de expresiones y formulas juridico-diplomaticas de uso corriente. Salamanca: Imprenta Varona, 350.ISBN84-300-9090-8
