Dollars (11975)

The dollar (represented by the dollar sign: "$" which comprises a single vertical line through a capital S) is the name of the official currency in several countries, dependencies and other regions. more...

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History

The name Thaler (from thal, or nowadays usually tal, "valley" or Sanskrit "bottom") came from the German coin Guldengroschen ("great guilder", being of silver but equal in value to a gold guilder), minted from the silver from a rich mine at Joachimsthal - Jáchymov (St. Joachim's Valley) in Bohemia (then part of the Holy Roman Empire, now part of the Czech Republic).

The name is related to the tolar in Slovenia (and historically in Bohemia), the daalder in the Netherlands and daler in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Of these, only the Slovenian Tolar is still in use. However, on 1 January 2007, it will be replaced by the euro.

The name "Spanish dollar" was used for a Spanish coin, the peso, worth eight reals (hence the nickname "pieces of eight"), which was widely circulated during the 18th century in the Spanish colonies in the New World. The use of the Spanish dollar and the Maria Theresa thaler as legal tender for the early United States are the reasons for the name of the nation's currency. However, the word dollar was in use in the English language as slang or mis-pronunciation for the thaler for about 200 years before the American Revolution, with many quotes in the plays of Shakespeare referring to dollars as money. Spanish dollars were in circulation in the Thirteen Colonies that became the United States, and were legal tender in Virginia.

Coins known as dollars were also in use in Scotland during the 17th century, and there is a claim that the use of the English word, and perhaps even the use of the coin, began at the University of St Andrews. This explains the sum of 'Ten thousand dollars' mentioned in Macbeth (Act I, Scene II), although the real Macbeth upon whom the play was based lived in the 11th century, making the reference anachronistic.

In the early 19th century, a British five-shilling piece, or crown, was sometimes called a dollar, probably because its appearance was similar to the Spanish dollar. This expression appeared again in the 1940s, when U.S. troops came to the UK during World War II. At the time a U.S. dollar was worth about 5s., so some of the U.S. soldiers started calling it a dollar. Consequently, they called the half crown "half a dollar", and the expression caught on among some locals and could be heard into the 1960s.

In the early days of the United States, the dollar was a defined unit of trade equal to 412.5 grains (26.73 g) of 90% silver. Today there is no definition of any weight or measure associated with its exchange. The silver content of U.S. coinage was mostly removed in 1965 and the dollar essentially became a baseless free-floating fiat currency; though the U.S. Mint continues to make silver $1 bullion coins at this weight.

Read more at Wikipedia.org