What is the symbol for the dollar. History of the origin of the American dollar

The dollar is denoted by the symbol $. One dollar is equal to one hundred cents. The issue of currency is carried out by the US Federal Reserve. Bucks (the slang name for the dollar) is also used in other countries where the national currency for some reason cannot be used as the main means of payment.

In the interbank world turnover, the share of the dollar is approaching 42%. It has the status of the main reserve currency of the world. The dollar is exchanged for other currencies in a freely floating exchange rate regime.

History of appearance

It is believed that the term "dollar" is a modified "taler". This word was called silver coins issued in different states. For example, in North America, even before the formation of 13 states, this was the name of the Spanish coin with a denomination of 8 reais. The US government began to mint its own currency not immediately, but only in 1794 - until that moment, Spanish money was in circulation.

Appearance

On the obverse of banknotes are portraits of American presidents. On the reverse is an image of any of the government buildings - the White House, the Capitol or Independence Hall. Only on a rare two-dollar bill can you see a reproduction of the painting "Independence Day" by artist John Trumbull. Also on the reverse of the one dollar bill is the Great Seal of the United States, which is a guarantee of the authenticity of any American document.

The bills were not always green - the design was approved only in 1928. Until that time, different colors were used in the manufacture of banknotes - there were even black and white money. They were easy to fake. During the Civil War, when the government decreed that it was necessary to issue an simply unrealistically large number of new banknotes, printers used the paint that they had the most - green.

Coins vary in size depending on the denomination. On the front side of the coins, portraits of presidents are minted, and on the back - heraldic symbols related to the history of the American state.

Denominations

The American dollar is banknotes and coins.

Now denominations of one, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollars are used. At the beginning of the 20th century, banknotes of five hundred, one thousand, five thousand and even ten thousand dollars were made. All banknotes are the same size and weight, and this does not depend on the denomination.

All banknotes that have been put into circulation since 1861 are considered legal tender to this day. Their gold backing was officially abolished in 1971.

The coins in circulation in the United States are as follows:

penny - one-cent coin;
nickel - five cent coin;
dime - one tenth of a dollar (10 cents);
quarter - a quarter (25 cents);
haf - half a dollar (50 cents);
iron dollar.

In addition to ordinary coins, there is the so-called presidential dollar. These coins exclusively feature portraits of deceased Presidents of the United States.

Protection

Since the first issue, the dollar has had a sufficient number of degrees of protection. Initially, banknotes are printed on special paper, which is produced by only one factory in the United States. This paper is legally prohibited from selling anywhere else. The composition of the paint is classified. Watermarks in the form of portraits of presidents on banknotes were printed from the very beginning of their production.

On the banknotes themselves, the denomination is microprinted, a security thread and colored fibers are used, which are clearly visible through the light. The paint visually changes its color, turning black when turning the banknote. Of the modern methods of protection, a three-dimensional tape with microlenses woven into paper is used. If you tilt the banknote to the sides, then the images on the tape will move. Relief imprint, unique series numbers and color-changing elements of banknotes are also used.

Appeal

The dollar is currently the most widely used currency in the world. Experts estimate that about $800 billion is in free circulation. The amount of money newly issued into circulation depends on the needs of the country - at least a third of this money supply goes outside the United States. As for the currency that circulates within the country, almost all newly printed banknotes are issued to replace banknotes that have expired.

The dollar sign is used to denote not only the American national currency, but also other monetary units, such as pesos, escudos. It is believed that the first dollar was designated as $ in 1778 by New Orleans businessman Oliver Polock, who introduced this symbol to the public. To date, there is no single version of the origin of the dollar sign. The most famous versions are:

A similar symbol was placed on coins that were minted from 1573 to 1825 in Potosi (a city in the Andes) - the world's largest industrial center of the 16th-17th centuries. These coins were well known in the North American colonies of Great Britain.
The dollar sign comes from the 8 peso (8 reales) and two vertical bars have been added to distinguish it.
The symbol is based on the Pillars of Hercules, placed over the Strait of Gibraltar and marking the end of the world in the view of the ancients. And the sign S is the waves washing them.
The dollar symbol is a modified coat of arms of the Spanish royal family, based on two Pillars of Hercules intertwined with a ribbon with a Latin saying.
The sign was formed from the superimposition of two letters P and S, denoting the Spanish pesos, which were written in the plural - capital P and lowercase s.
Some researchers believe that when the Spaniards exported gold from the American colonies in cast bars, they put on them the sign S (for the initial letter of the country - Spain). After the ingots arrived in Spain, they were marked with a vertical line, and when sent to the colonies, another one.
The sign comes from the ancient Roman currency sestertius - sestertius (from semis + tertius). This is a silver coin worth 2.5 pounds of copper. It was customary to designate sesterces with the letters LLS or IIS, sometimes HS. This abbreviation stands for Libra-Libra-Semis, or, in other words, "Pound-Pound-Half". Over time, the two letters L turned into two lines intersecting the letter S. This is how the sestertius was designated in ancient Rome.
In ancient Rome, $ meant "slave" (lat. servus). The number of slaves spoke of the wealth of the owner. Planters used the $ symbol in their ledgers to denote a live commodity.
The dollar symbol comes from the overlay of the first letters of the country's name: United States (United States).

Regardless of its origin, the American currency sign is one of the most recognizable symbols in the world. The only thing that has changed in it is that on a computer keyboard it is written with one instead of two vertical strokes.

In addition, the international order of writing the dollar sign before the money amount is a tradition that the Americans inherited from the British - the latter always put the pound sign immediately before the number. That is, $100 is correct, not $100.

The dollar is the main monetary unit not only in the United States, but also in many other countries - therefore, the dollar sign "$" is used to denote not only the American dollar, but also the currencies of other countries with the addition of additional letters to the main symbol indicating belonging to one or another state: for example, Trinidad and Tobago - TT $, Barbados - Bds $, Australia - A $ or Au $, and so on.

The very name "dollar" has a complicated origin. It was based on, at first glance, the word “Joachimsthaler”, which is far from it. This was the name of a sixteenth-century coin that was minted near a silver ore mine in the Czech city of Joachimsthal. For convenience and speed of pronunciation, the name was shortened to "thaler". In Denmark, due to the peculiarities of pronunciation, the coin was already called “daler”. In the UK, a little later, the name was transformed into a more consonant and modern "dollar". So, in England of the 17th-18th centuries, any silver coins similar to a thaler were called "dollars" - and already in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" you can find a mention of them:

King of Norway, asked for peace,
But before burying the dead,
He had to on the island of St. Colm
Give us ten thousand dollars...

We are accustomed to the designation of the dollar with the Latin letter "S", usually crossed out by two vertical lines, but sometimes by one. A single-vertical version of this character is used in printed press editions, as two thin strokes are much worse printed when using small newspaper fonts.

But where, in fact, did such a designation of the dollar come from? - The history of the origin of the sign and its meaning are dark and mysterious. The dollar existed for more than two centuries (the American currency appeared in 1785), and during this period of time it managed to acquire many different legends and theories, some of which are very convincing. However, there is no proven version, and we can only, having considered the main assumptions of historians, tend to the chosen option.

Dollar sign options

One of the most likely versions is considered to be the possible origin of the dollar sign from the Spanish abbreviation "P" s, which once denoted the monetary units of this state - the peso or piastr. From the letter "P" presumably only a vertical line remained, which made it possible to increase the recording speed, and the letter " S "remained unchanged as a background. On the other hand, in this case, "S" is a minor ending letter, since it only denotes the plural of pesos. Therefore, it seems not quite logical to simplify the letter "P" in accounting documents, indicating a specific monetary unit.

Another version says that the letter "S" is the first letter of the word "Spain" (Spain). This view is reinforced by the fact that the "S" was placed on gold bars exported from the Spanish colonies of the New World. When the bars were sent to Spain, they were allegedly marked with a vertical line, and after arrival, another one was added to control the origin of the gold.

Some US experts believe that the origin of the sign "$" was the abbreviation "PTSI" - this is how silver was marked from the Bolivian mines of Potosi (the world's largest industrial center of the 16-17th centuries), which went to mint coins in pesos from 1573 to 1825. These coins were in circulation with the North American colonies of Great Britain.

The crossed-out "$" could just as well be the remnants of the crossed-out eight, because once in North America the Spanish reals were widely used for monetary settlements. They weighed and, accordingly, cost one-eighth of the English pound sterling, in writing they were designated as "1/8" - and therefore they were called "piece of eight" ("eights"). Then the second strikethrough could come from the European tradition of scribes to designate abbreviations in this way.

The “royal” version claims that the dollar sign is nothing more than a stylized coat of arms of the Spanish royal family, since in 1492 King Ferdinand II of Aragon chose the Pillars of Hercules (Columnae Herculis) as a symbol - this is how the rocks framing the entrance to Gibraltar were called in antiquity. strait (Rock of Gibraltar, North Rock, Mount Jebel Musa in Morocco, and Mount Abila near Ceuta). The symbolic Pillars of Hercules are wrapped around a ribbon with the motto "Non plus ultra" ("no further" - meaning "... the limits of the world"). However, with the discovery of new lands beyond Gibraltar by Columbus, the motto changed to “Plus ultra”, that is, “even further”. Emperor Charles V chose this motto, and when the largest silver mines were discovered in Mexico and Peru, the “$” symbol began to be minted on the coins of the New World, which were also widely circulated in Europe.

The most patriotic version of the origin of the dollar sign says that it was formed by superimposing the letters “U” and “S” (from the English United States), and the symbol acquired its modern look after the lower part of the U was “erased” as unnecessary, leaving from letters only in two vertical lines. This version was promoted by the American writer Ayn Rand.

The "Silver" version is similar to the previous one by simplifying the letter "U", but according to it, the letters "U" and "S" are short for "Silver Unit" ("Silver Union").

The "Roman" version is also quite popular - it explains the origin of the dollar sign from "Sestertius" - "sestertius" was the designation of the ancient Roman monetary unit. In writing, it looked like the abbreviation "LLS" or "lls" ("Libra-Libra-Semis" - two and a half pounds), where all the elements of the dollar sign are simply written separately from each other. Later, they could be combined, forming the symbol familiar to us.

The religious version explains the origin of the sign from a modified reverse of the Austrian thaler depicting the crucified Jesus and a snake wrapping around the cross. The Masonic version, close to fans of conspiracy theories and secret societies, says: the symbol "$" is the designation of the Temple of King Solomon (the initial letter from "Solomon" and two columns).

But the truth can be much more trivial and literally under our noses: the dollar sign could be derived from ... a shilling, which is denoted by the letter "S", which is sometimes "reinforced" by a vertical line.

As for the international order of writing the dollar sign before the amount of money - this is a tradition that the Americans inherited from the British - the latter always put the pound sign immediately before the number.

The dollar sign is known all over the world and looks like the English letter S with two lines drawn vertically and parallel to each other.

What the dollar sign means is known, but where did it come from? The origin of the dollar sign is mysterious, it appeared long before the country called the United States of America. Such a symbol was found in ancient Rome among the slave traders. With the advent of computers and Word and Excel programs, he began to be depicted as an S with one stick. This symbol is traditionally written before the face value. It looks like this: $100, which reads like "$100".

The sign of the US currency is not an invention of the Americans, but a synthesis of the experience of many people who keep personal accounts and peoples developed in antiquity who have a national currency. They used various abbreviations for cursive writing and came up with an image of a money symbol, which they then transferred to their coins.

Where the Americans borrowed this sign from, no one can say for sure. Its origin is not clear, and the truth is hidden under a pile of historical events taking place during the formation of a new country. It is safe to say what it means and is used in financial records.

Only versions remain that explain what exactly could have prompted Oliver Polock, a businessman involved in the supply of weapons to the army, to use such a symbol next to the amount he spent on buying weapons. He used it in financial reports, which he sent to US Congressman Robert Morris. This official became the first official representative who used the now well-known dollar sign in government documents. It happened in 1773. In 1797, in April, this symbol was used for the first time in a book written by C. Lee. It was called ʻAmerican Accountant`. Officially, the release date of the book by this author is considered the birthday of the dollar symbol.

Where did the idea for the symbol come from?

The first settlers who settled in North America did not have their own currency and used the means of payment that came to them. Since they did not have a financial education and were not numismatists, most often they called large silver coins thalers, which sounded like “dalyar” in oral speech. Thaler at that time was a well-known means of payment. It was issued from the 16th to the 19th century, and this coin was in circulation in Europe and in international trade. Many of the coins used had a sign similar to what is considered the symbol of the dollar in the modern world. There is an assumption that the word "dollar" is a slang word that was born in the speech of immigrants to refer to any money that they used in purchase and sale transactions. The first paper dollar was printed in 1785.

Spanish version of the symbol's origin

The sign that the Americans used as a symbol for their national currency, they could see on the peso. This coin was made of silver and was used in transactions of sale in medieval Spain, as well as in its colonies, which were located on the territory of South America. The sign of the US currency could be formed from the combination of two letters P and S, denoting the Spanish pesos, into one. Two letters: the first and last in this word were connected and received an icon denoting this monetary unit. The capital letter P and the lowercase s merged into this symbol: $

There is speculation that the sign used to denote the American currency is a truncated figure 8, depicted on the peso with a face value of 8 reais. Two vertical lines on this figure were added to distinguish the coins of one country from another. A similar symbol can be seen on coins that were minted from 1573 to 1825 in the city of Potosi, which was famous as a major world industrial center in the 16th-17th centuries. Such coins were in circulation in the colonies of North America, owned by Great Britain.

With the number 8 there is another version, which cites as evidence the fact that in America they had the habit of dividing the peso or thaler into eight parts and writing on each a sign that denoted one eighth of the cut bill. The English phrase piese of eight did not fit on a piece of paper, and the inscription was replaced with the symbol of a crossed out eight. To prove this version, they give an example with a 25-cent coin, which is colloquially called "two bits", which means "two pieces" in translation.

Royal Court of Spain and US currency symbol

The Spaniards exported a lot of gold from their colonies. In connection with this historical fact, there is a version that says that the letter S on the symbol is nothing more than the initial letter in the name of Spain, which is spelled in English as Spain. The Spaniards, who exported gold in rectangular bars, put on them the sign of the country that owned the gold - S. After the bars arrived in the Spanish treasury, they put a line on them, and when sent to the colonies - one more.

With the Spanish origin of this symbol, there is another version associated with the royal court. Its coat of arms is based on two Pillars of Hercules, which are intertwined with a ribbon with an inscription in Latin. They changed on the dollar sign and turned into two vertical lines.

There is a reference to the Pillars of Hercules in yet another version. Some believe that the Pillars of Hercules, which were placed over the Strait of Gibraltar, are used as the basis of the symbol. They symbolize the end of the world in the view of the ancients. And the letter S is a symbol of the wave that washes them.

Ancient Rome and the dollar symbol in modern America

Another version leads to Ancient Rome. In this country, the symbol $ meant "slave", which in Latin is servus. Slave owners in ancient times used the $ symbol in their ledger books to indicate the number of slaves to be sold.

There was also a monetary unit called sestertius - sestertius. It was a silver coin with a face value of 2.5 pounds of copper. Sestertius was denoted in writing by the letters LLS, and sometimes IIS, or HS. After some time, this record of several letters turned into a monogram, which became a symbol of the sestertium.

A similar version, only with the initial letters United States, is put forward by supporters of statehood. They believe that the US dollar symbol originated from the overlapping of the letters U S.

In the modern financial world, the idea of a symbol used for is often used by various countries who want their currency to be quoted on the exchange market in the same way as the US dollar. The same symbol used to denote the American currency is still in the countries of South America, the former Spanish colonies, in which the peso and escudo are in circulation. To denote this currency, the familiar symbol of money is traditionally used.

For the world community, this sign means the stability and prosperity of the country, whose currency is accepted for payment in all banks of the world.

"$" IS ONE OF THE MOST RECOGNIZED SYMBOLS OF MODERN TIME, most people unmistakably identify an "S" with one or two vertical "sticks" as a dollar sign. The dollar is the main monetary unit not only in the United States, but also in many other countries - therefore, the dollar sign "$" is used to denote not only the American dollar, but also the currencies of other countries with the addition of additional letters to the main symbol indicating belonging to one or another state: for example, Trinidad and Tobago - TT $, Barbados - Bds $, Australia - A $ or Au $, and so on.

Why exactly “S” became the basis for the designation of the American currency, because the word “dollar” does not even have such a letter? The fact is that initially "$" is not a dollar sign, but a peso.

in eight countries(Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Philippines and Uruguay) banknotes are called pesos

The history of the word "dollar" began in the 16th century in the Czech Republic. Europe then became rich in silver for the first time in a long time. For centuries, Europeans spent gold and silver to buy silk, spices and other exotic luxuries, as a result of which the reserves of precious metals in the Old World were depleted. At the beginning of the 16th century, quite large deposits of silver ore were discovered in Tyrol, Saxony (now the regions of Austria and Germany) and Bohemia (modern Czech Republic), and silver coins began to actively force gold coins out of circulation. "Joachimsthaler". This was the name of a sixteenth-century coin that was minted near a silver ore mine in the Czech city of Joachimsthal.

Bohemian yohimstalers became the standard in the minting of silver coins and soon any silver currency was already called the abbreviated word "taler". Each nation reinterpreted the Czech term in its own way - say, the Dutch pronounced it as "daalder", in Slovenia "taler" became "tolar". In Denmark, due to the peculiarities of pronunciation, the coin was already called “daler”.

In the UK, a little later, the name was transformed into a more consonant and modern "dollar". So, in England of the 17th-18th centuries, any silver coins similar to a thaler were called "dollars" - and already in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" you can find a mention of them:

King of Norway, asked for peace,
But before burying the dead,
He had to on the island of St. Colm
Give us ten thousand dollars ...

When Spain began to actively develop the wealth of the New World, the European deposits of precious metals lost their former importance, for the next few hundred years the “silver center” of the world moved to Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. Reals, they were also called "Spanish dollars" or "peso de ocho" (eng. "piece of eight" - an eighth, "octopus", each real was worth 1/8 of an English pound), minted from "Indian" silver flooded Europe and gradually ousted the thalers from the market, becoming the main international currency. To understand how great the influence of Spanish money was on the culture and economy of that time, pay attention to the names of some modern national currencies.

Eight countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Philippines and Uruguay) call their banknotes pesos. Chinese yuan and Japanese yen got their names in honor of the shape of Spanish coins (Chinese "yuan" - round) - Japan and China took them as a basis for creating their money. Riyals, which are calculated in Saudi Arabia and Qatari rials, also owe their names to the Spanish reals. And finally, the main thing - when the young state of the United States of America took care of minting its own money, they were called "dollar", Spanish money was then widely used in settlements within the country.

Dollar sign options

One of the most likely versions is the possible origin of the dollar sign from the Spanish abbreviation "P's", which once denoted the monetary units of this state - the peso or piastres. From the letter "P" supposedly remained only a vertical line, which allowed to increase the speed of writing, and the letter "S" remained unchanged as a background. On the other hand, in this case, "S" is a minor letter ending, since it only denotes the plural of pesos. Therefore, it seems not entirely logical to simplify the letter “P” in accounting documents, indicating a specific monetary unit.

They even write that in 1778, New Orleans businessman Oliver Pollock invented the dollar sign. It is believed that the original meaning of the $ sign is associated with the designation of the Spanish piastres, which were actively used in America in those years. In business papers, piastres were traditionally abbreviated to a combination of the Latin letters PS, the imposition of which one on top of the other gave the sign currently used.

Potosi silver real: $ symbol - monogram of PTSI letters (Potosi)

Some US experts believe that the origin of the sign "$" was the abbreviation "PTSI" - this is how silver was marked from the Bolivian mines of Potosi (the world's largest industrial center of the 16-17 centuries), which went to mint coins in pesos from 1573 to 1825. These coins were in circulation with the North American colonies of Great Britain.

The crossed-out "$" could just as well be the remnants of the crossed-out eight - after all, Spanish reals were once widely used in North America for monetary settlements. They weighed and, accordingly, cost one-eighth of the English pound sterling, in writing they were designated as "1/8" - and therefore they were called "piece of eight" ("eights"). Then the second strikethrough could come from the European tradition of scribes to designate abbreviations in this way.

The “royal” version claims that the dollar sign is nothing more than a stylized coat of arms of the Spanish royal family, since in 1492 King Ferdinand II of Aragon chose the Pillars of Hercules (Columnae Herculis) as a symbol - this is how the rocks framing the entrance to Gibraltar were called in antiquity. Strait (Rock of Gibraltar, North Rock, Mount Jebel Musa in Morocco and Mount Abila near Ceuta). The symbolic Pillars of Hercules are wrapped around a ribbon with the motto "Non plus ultra" ("no further" - meaning "... the limits of the world"). However, with the discovery of new lands beyond Gibraltar by Columbus, the motto changed to “Plus ultra”, that is, “even further”. Emperor Charles V chose this motto, and when the largest silver mines were discovered in Mexico and Peru, the “$” symbol began to be minted on the coins of the New World, which were also widely circulated in Europe.

Ribbed Pillars of Hercules (Seville municipality, Spain, 16th century)

Another popular version says that dollar symbol appeared thanks to the United States of America (it seems to me that this version was invented by the Americans themselves). In English, the name sounds like United States of America (abbreviated as USA). So, this version claims that the symbol is derived from the name of the American state in English. In this case, the first two letters and (U and S) are shifted, and part of the letter U has changed: the lower part of the letter has disappeared, and only two vertical sticks remain, which, in combination with the letter S, gave the symbol to the national currency of the country. Too smacks of genuine patriotism. This version was promoted by the American writer Ayn Rand.

The "Silver" version is similar to the previous one by simplifying the letter "U", but according to it, the letters "U" and "S" are short for "Silver Unit" ("Silver Union").

It is also impossible to exclude the version of the origin of the sign from the designation of the ancient Roman monetary unit sestertius - sestertius from semis + tertius (half a third, two and a half), a silver coin worth two and a half pounds of copper. Sestertius was denoted by the letters "LLS" or "IIS", sometimes "HS". This abbreviation stands for: "Libra-Libra-Semis", - that is: "Pound-Pound-Half". When abbreviated, two letters "L" with a truncated lower transverse line were superimposed on the letter "S" and it turned out like a dollar sign. This is how the monetary unit of the sesterces was designated on the letter in Ancient Rome. The ancient Roman theme was very fashionable during the Age of Enlightenment. So, for example, the seat of the US Congress is called the Capitol (the main hill in Rome), and the upper house of the US Congress is called the Senate - just like in ancient Rome.

Which version are we missing? Complement!

sources

http://origin.iknowit.ru/paper1238.html

http://www.factroom.ru/world/dollar-sign

http://ria.ru/spravka/20080401/102641988.html

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BB_%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0 %BB%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0

But for example, to your attention or why. Look also at and learn about. Well, how without it - The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy is made -