Why Is the Dollar Sign a Letter S?

http://observationdeck.io9.com/why-is-the-dollar-sign-a-letter-s-1683940575

by shovel • 11 years ago

428 128 11 years ago

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blahedo2• 11 years ago

I've heard this etymology before, but the article would be a lot more convincing if it showed an actual in-the-wild example of the "intermediate form" of the symbol, with the P and S exactly superimposed on each other...

lamuerteflaca3• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign

I see no reason why make something up that would be quite easy to disprove by looking at old records.

eru2• 11 years ago

Oh, it's still the internet. People are lazy, and people make up things all the time.

nemo2• 11 years ago

Florian Cajori's A History of Mathematical Notations goes into the history and notes examples of old written manuscripts showing the intermediate form in use, with one example where both were used interchangeably in a letter. He examined the question in depth, showed that the earliest uses in the US had a single stroke, with the double stroke only coming later, and dealt with the other theories showing as conclusively as possible that it's a peso sign composed of a superimposed P/S. It's an old book, and not on a web site, but you could probably find a copy at a library.

acqq3• 11 years ago

Here's the link to the book you refer to (two volumes in one, the second volume starts at p. 469). I can't see where it writes about the dollar sign, can you help me?

http://monoskop.org/images/2/21/Cajori_Florian_A_History_of_...

Edit: thanks Nemo!

johnzim• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign

unknownian• 11 years ago

Gawker Media turning wikipedia entries into articles. Well I do it sometimes as well.

urda• 11 years ago

Seriously, why are Gawker links even allowed on here? Embarrassing.

gweinberg2• 11 years ago

Then wikipedia article is better.

Personally, I find the US answer more plausible. because of the existence of the two bar version. It's much more likely for people to simplify the two bar version by dropping a bar than to pointlessly complicate the symbol by adding an extra bar for no reason, so I suspect the two bar version was the original.

pron2• 11 years ago

Except $ is also the symbol for the peso. More evidence is necessary to track the first introduction of the symbol.

clay_to_n• 11 years ago

In the comments section of the article, someone claimed that in their Spanish-speaking country $ was used to refer to pesos, but with two bars it meant USD. So maybe the two bars in the USD was introduced to separate it from the peso when they were both common currencies.

elpachuco4• 11 years ago

It would be better if you used evidence when choosing what you believe rather then rely on your personal preferences and biases.

masswerk3• 11 years ago

There are some alternative theories on this, too. The one I learned was the sign being derived from the Pillars of Hercules (two vertical bars) with a banner (the "S") wrapped around it, reading "[non] plus ultra", as adopted by Charles V for the Spanish coat of arms and later stamped on the reverse of Spanish dollar coins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Columnas_Plus_Ultra.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar

[Edit:] There's actually a bit of irony in this, considering the Pillars of Hercules were marking the end of the world (as lined out by the banner "non plus ultra") and the minted silver coming from the New World beyond ...

blumkvist• 11 years ago

From the article's comment section:

It is not the case, I'm sorry to say, although that is certainly a commonly-repeated story. (There's a similar urban legend in Brazil involving the Pillars of Heracles and the meandering route used by Tariq ibn Ziyad.) But the textual evidence (years and years of preserved handwritten merchant communications from multiple nations and colonies on both sides of the Atlantic showing a clear progression from PS to a $) is very much in favor of the superimposed PS.

masswerk3• 11 years ago

Personally, I would think there's some kind of inheritance from the older Lira (later pound) sign "£". Remarkably, this one is also coming in two variants, both with a single and a (probably older) double stroke. (Unicode U+00A3 and U+00A4 respectively.) A letter with a horizontal or vertical stroke became somewhat of a universal signature of a currency symbol (think of cents, Yen, &c).

The stroke-signature actually goes back in history as far as to the antique Roman symbols for As and Denarius. (A nice overview of currency symbols may be found at http://www.signographie.de/cms/upload/pdf/SIGNA_GewWaehrZch_... [German].)

[Edit:] Also, consider the former predominance of the version featuring two distinctive vertical strokes, as lined out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018366 . A "P" with a doubled vertical stroke would just make a (mirrored) paragraph sign. But I confess not to know, what the original version would have been (single or double stroke).

[Edit:] Another hint on "$" not being derived from the letter "S" might be the significant smaller vertical extent of the "S"-like part than the ones of capital letters, both raised from the baseline and smaller than the X-height.

mkagenius• 11 years ago

How interesting. 'Paisa' used in India as currency also sounds like peso, however, seems to have different origin:

"""The word paisa is from Hindi & Urdu paisā, a quarter-anna coin, ultimately from Sanskrit term padāṁśa meaning 'quarter part', from pada "foot or quarter" and aṁśa "part".""" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa

burrox• 11 years ago

It's also how we denote the people of a certain region in Colombia. I don't think it's related though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa_Region

dmsinger• 11 years ago

Until keyboards were everywhere (which was a while ago, yes), I wasn't used to seeing the $ with a single vertical line in a money context. Myth or not, it made the interlocking U S very believable. It just makes me wonder which came first, and how the double line came about, if it wasn't there originally.

JimboOmega• 11 years ago

What I'd like to know more is why it goes before the quantity and not after.

Nobody writes "it weighs lb. 10" or "it's m 20 long". Or even "I had %20 of it".

Subconsciously I always read "$10" as "dollar ten". It drives me a little crazy.

blackobelisk• 11 years ago

sometimes I actually format it "10$" and it weirds people out. makes sense to me though.

acadien2• 11 years ago

It really makes no sense, every other unit follows the number but with money it goes before. The temperature outside is F10, that package weights lbs14, the football is at psi1.8.

xxxyy• 11 years ago

Don't mean to offend anyone, but there are more issues with units in the US ;)

[0] http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-us...

libria• 11 years ago

Infuriatingly, we write 10¢ in the "right" order.

DanBC• 11 years ago

Especially since in American you'd write 10c, and not c10.

There's a stack exchange comment saying it's harder to forge $20 to $320 than it is to forge 20$ to 320$.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-is-the...

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013/why-is-the-...

I'd like to know why we do it too. I mean, I know "just because" but I'd like to know how it started.

jmccree• 11 years ago

From a quick google image search, it appears that at least some EU checks also follow the format of putting the currency symbol before the numerical amount. It makes sense on the face of things that $200.00 is harder to alter than 200.00$ .

stephentmcm• 11 years ago

The forging statement seems rather silly. $20 -> $200 is still a pretty good mark up, plus in cheques or similar paper based money transfers it's normal to have the amount written out in words as well as in numerals.

yourapostasy• 11 years ago

The forging rationale is likely very outdated now.

If I have a legal document where I need to be certain of its provenance after going out into the world, it is a digitally signed PDF.

If I print a paper check where the numbers need to be tamper-resistant against casual forging, I use a secure number font. I don't anticipate ever being in a position where my adversary in that use case is a determined, professional forger. I'd insist upon encrypted and/or insured electronic transactions, like through SWIFT or ACH, before I get to the point I'd be worried about professional forgers.

nhaehnle• 11 years ago

There's a stack exchange comment saying it's harder to forge $20 to $320 than it is to forge 20$ to 320$.

This is why you fill the empty part of the field with a long horizontal line.

caf2• 11 years ago

Years are another one like dollars, though: C20 is sometimes used for "20th Century" and it's not uncommon to see a year written as AD2015.

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

Of course "AD" is Latin, and the AD2015 order is probably appropriate for Latin.

I wonder if $20 comes from the appropriate order for Spanish, now that I know the $ symbol comes from Spanish!

blahedo2• 11 years ago

I worked for a summer in the text-to-speech lab at Motorola and remember banging my head on this problem---especially because something like "$2 million" or even "$2m" has to get rewritten for the speech engine. It's like a middle-endian notation.

ScottBurson2• 11 years ago

If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars, whatever that is.

Years ago an acquaintance of mine told me about a bad experience he had had with some cell company's customer service. It seems that the contract he had received had said that he would be charged for data service at the rate of ".02¢/kilobyte". (This was in the very early days of cellular data, so prices weren't well established, and I'm probably not remembering the correct number, but as you'll see, that's not the point.) When the bill came, he found that he was in fact charged 2¢/kB -- 100 times more than he expected. He called to complain, but was unable to communicate to the customer service agent that, correctly read, .02¢ = $.0002. The agent apparently looked at the notation ".02¢" and read it as "$.02".

One can understand the psychology of this. The notation ".02¢" contains two indications that the value 2 is to be multiplied by 1/100: one is given by the position of the decimal point, and the other by the use of the cent sign instead of the dollar sign. But if you read those two indications as redundant rather than independent, you get the interpretation used by the agent (and apparently also by the person who wrote the contract).

So I would suggest that the "$10 dollars" thing is not as benign as it appears. Mathematical notation is not supposed to have redundancies in it, and we should not get used to seeing them there -- particularly when money is involved.

grkvlt• 11 years ago

I think your friend was actually trying to tell you about this story [1] not something that actually happened to them.

[1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-kno...

SilasX• 11 years ago

If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars, whatever that is.

Not quite the same thing, but I had a senile biology teacher who looked for any pretense to deduct points on papers. For example, when you reported data from lab work in tabular form: "points off -- these numbers don't have units". "But the column headings indicate the units -- that would make it redundant!" "Not good enough."

eru2• 11 years ago

Actually, mathematical notation often has quite some redundancy. But yeah, you don't want to hunt it down in too many different places.

jzwinck• 11 years ago

The British put their currency symbol in front as well.

Malaysians write theirs like "RM8"; RM being their local currency symbol despite the ISO one being MYR (this happens because ISO puts the country first but many countries would write it out the other way around).

A bunch of other countries don't write any symbol at all, only the number. Some, like Indonesia, also have an implied thousands (000) at the end, since their base currency unit is very small. So you may see "8" but it means "8000 IDR."

FreeFull• 11 years ago

For another example of a currency where the symbol does go on the right end, there is the Polish currency (złoty). For example, "5,99 zł" (although often the zł will be skipped)

dorfsmay• 11 years ago

I came to the comment section exactly for this. I've fought with my kids and showed them unit algebra (5$/day for 3 days:(53)($day/day) = 15$) to explain why all units need to be behind the numbers. They got it, but then got in trouble in school (in Canada). Dollar sign HAS to be in front - Why? Because that's how it's done.

aroberge• 11 years ago

In French schools in Canada, the proper notation (e.g. 5$) is used.

mkramlich2• 11 years ago

I hear you. but do what I and some others are doing. wherever you can get away with it put the $ after, as in "10$". let's be the change we wish to see in the world. I also try to express dates in sort-friendly format wherever I can, like "2015 Feb 7" (or 20150207 if computer must parse or align, etc). I also express measurements in metric/SI wherever I can. I also never bought into this whole "put TL;DR at the end" anti-pattern I see some folks doing (assume young) when I can continue to have a "summary: foo" at the beginning, which is clearly better in two particular ways.

one could argue that "10 USD" is even better overall, with the negative of requing two extra chars.

gnopgnip• 11 years ago

Wouldn't this just take even longer to pass information because you are not using the expected format?

CanadaKaz• 11 years ago

There are many different explanations floating around. The one I like the most is that it is actually US and that U is placed on top of the S. That's why there are often two vertical lines.

lamuerteflaca3• 11 years ago

Isn't it better to prefer the one with the most evidence supporting it?

pluma2• 11 years ago

That sounds far too reasonable.

My preferred explanation is that the dollar sign looks like that because the dollar sign creating pixies created it that way.

(all hail the dollar sign creating pixies)

iamwil• 11 years ago

Hrm. At one point on the internets, I read that it was just the letters 'U' and 'S' (for United States) overlaid on top of each other. And over time, we lost the round pipe at the bottom, and one of the lines.

It seemed like a plausible story, and because I wasn't doing hardcore research, I didn't look into it further. Now, I always wonder if some fun fact I have in my head is actually true or not.

Reminds me of that quote about Abe Lincoln and the internet.

lotsofmangos• 11 years ago

From following the links through to the FAQ of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in the U.S. Department of the Treasury (the URL is cute) : http://www.moneyfactory.gov/faqlibrary.html

"What is the origin of the $ sign?"

"The origin of the "$" sign has been variously accounted for, however, the most widely accepted explanation is that the symbol is the result of evolution, independently in different places, of the Mexican or Spanish "P's" for pesos, or piastres, or pieces of eight. The theory, derived from a study of old manuscripts, is that the "S" gradually came to be written over the "P," developing a close equivalent of the "$" mark. It was widely used before the adoption of the United States dollar in 1785."

Unless someone shows me good evidence to the contrary, I think I'm going to assume they have a good idea of what they are on about on this topic.

arvinjoar• 11 years ago

This is what I believed as well, and the theory is actually included on the Wikipedia page, but only for the double-stroke dollar sign[1].

I read Atlas Shrugged as a teenager and that's where I got it from.

[1] = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign#From_.22U.S..22

javert• 11 years ago

This theory is a "fact" in the fictional world of Atlas Shrugged, but the author (Rand) ackowledged that in the real world, it is not known to be true.

gshrikant• 11 years ago

The evolution of the £ (pound) symbol has a similar, fascinating history behind it too. It was recently discussed on a 99% Invisible podcast [1].

[1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/

_ak• 11 years ago

Whenever I think about it, I find it quite fascinating that a pound literally used to be a pound of silver. Another aspect is the age of the Lsd system, and how long it was held onto.

lucio• 11 years ago

The S and the pillars story seems simpler, and also accounts for the $ with two vertical bars.

Here in Argentina, we still call money: "silver", as in "Do you have silver to pay for that?"

It was called "peso"(weight) because you used to WEIGH your money instead of "counting" it.

It is funny that we still call it "silver" and "weight" nowadays when fiat-money is everywhere.

ascotan• 11 years ago

Even thought wikipedia clearly calls the spanish dollar a 'piece of eight', it's pretty clear that peso means 'weight' and the dollar has about 8x the weight in silver of a spanish real. It's probably better to call it a 'weight of eight'. http://www.coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinText/Sp-milled.2.html

mjklin• 11 years ago

NB: In all Spanish-speaking countries that I know of, you can call the currency "peso" even if that's not its official name. In Costa Rica, for example, they will often say "cien pesos" rather than "cien colones" if they're in an informal situation or mood.

jstalin2• 11 years ago

It's fascinating to understand that originally there was no "official" US currency, only that the Spanish dollar was circulating as a sort of international currency. The US dollar was then defined a unit of weight of either gold or silver and not some floating, independent notion of value. Anyone could bring a quantity of gold or silver into the mint and have it turned into a dollar coin. Of course, that original notion has been inflated away and the dollar has lost some 99% of its value.

One of my favorite sites for seeing the effect of debasement is http://www.coinflation.com/.

ajross• 11 years ago

I've read this post over several times and for the life of me it seems that you believe the existence of a fiat currency is... a bad thing?

jstalin2• 11 years ago

Yes, I've become fairly certain that fiat currency is indeed a bad thing.

Qwertious• 11 years ago

Well, you could exchange it for gold, although gold isn't necessarily useful. Ask Spain what happened when they focused on getting precious metals at the expense of real non-monetary wealth in the economy (like cork trees).

Answer: Inflation, economic collapse.

(If someone could either provide a citation or call me out on my BS, that would be nice; I could be full of shit here.)

Turing_Machine• 11 years ago

"It's fascinating to understand that originally there was no "official" US currency, only that the Spanish dollar was circulating as a sort of international currency."

This still happens to some degree. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Theresa_thaler

Still minted and still used in trade, though they stopped changing the date on them in 1780.

Still made of real silver, too.

TwiztidK• 11 years ago

That site just adds more to the argument that we should get rid of the penny. The coins are materially pretty expensive compared to their worth as a currency.

chucksmart2• 11 years ago

i thought $ was a snake on a stick.

chucksmart2• 11 years ago

"Another theory is that the dollar sign may have also originated from Hermes, the Greek god of bankers, thieves, messengers, and tricksters. One of his symbols was the caduceus, a staff from which ribbons or snakes dangled in a sinuous curve." Thanks for the downvotes.

d13• 11 years ago

"Alternatively, the $ symbol derives from the scroll on the pillar, on the reverse of the "pillar dollar" variety of pieces of eight [Spanish Dollars]."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar#mediaviewer/File...

Which you can clearly see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar#mediaviewer/File...

smegel• 11 years ago

And because the US dollar was named after the Spanish peso de ocho "dollar" coin

I am still not sure where the word "dollar" comes from though. If we are using the sign for pesos, who not use the word "pesos" instead of "dollar"?

ddebernardy• 11 years ago

Dollar comes from daler/taler:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dollar

No idea why the pesos sign became the dollar sign, but I'd image it may have something to do with the Spaniards being around long before the English in the Americas.

elpachuco4• 11 years ago

>No idea why the pesos sign became the dollar sign, but I'd image it may have something to do with the Spaniards being around long before the English in the Americas

That is the whole point of this article . It tells you where the sign came from.

wyck2• 11 years ago

Here is a $ sign from pre 1700 Spanish coin http://www.ancientresource.com/lots/shipwreck-pirate-coins.h... ( #CS20730 ). There are more of these that pre date that, so this article is fairly opinionated.

elpachuco4• 11 years ago

Although it looks like the Peso sign I'm not sure it really is. Why would you put the Peso sign in a coin. It probably is something else and du to wear and tear now it looks like a Peso sign. Look at this other coin for example:

http://www.ancientresource.com/images/pirate-shipwreck-treas...

ps: The link to the image you are talking about is:

http://www.ancientresource.com/images/pirate-shipwreck-treas...

And its correct id is:#CS2073

ilaksh• 11 years ago

That's just the nice version that goes around. It actually represents devices like manacles. Used for counting slaves.

Our civilization is still based on a type of wage-based slavery.

The euro symbol is another example.

kijin4• 11 years ago

Fun trivia: When Americans went to East Asia with their funny money, the Asians quickly replaced the $ sign with a similar-looking local character: 弗.

Nowadays in Japan and Korea, you often see headlines like "1兆弗" (1 trillion U.S. dollars).

But 弗 originally means "not". So American money is not real money ;)

cheapsteak• 11 years ago

I've never seen 弗 in use in Chinese newspapers to refer to dollars. Any sources on this? Baidu-ing "兆弗" is only turning up results for a Shanghai company called "兆弗"

kijin4• 11 years ago

Sorry, here's an errata: The letter 弗 is commonly used in Korea and Japan. In China, the U.S. dollar is usually written as 美元 ("American yuan", but since both the dollar and the yuan derive from the thaler as the article says, it can mean "American thaler" as well).

msaravanan• 11 years ago

That's interesting. Where I live (India), we didn't have a currency symbol until recently. Our currency is the Indian Rupee and we used to prefix "Rs." and "Re." to the value.

The govt. invited people from around the country to send in their designs and we finally chose one (20B9 on unicode). But it took us 2 years to start using the symbol on currency notes.

elpachuco4• 11 years ago

It is really annoying to hear so many opinions here choosing to believe an alternate version simply because it sounds better to them rather than because of any actual evidence. (Are we still in Hacker News or is it a Sunday thing?) It feels like I'm reading opinions by creationists.

Even the us government agrees that the $ symbol is a peso sign. [1]

Here is the relevant piece:

>What is the origin of the $ sign? The origin of the "$" sign has been variously accounted for, however, the most widely accepted explanation is that the symbol is the result of evolution, independently in different places, of the Mexican or Spanish "P's" for pesos, or piastres, or pieces of eight. The theory, derived from a study of old manuscripts, is that the "S" gradually came to be written over the "P," developing a close equivalent of the "$" mark. It was widely used before the adoption of the United States dollar in 1785.<<

[1] http://www.moneyfactory.gov/faqlibrary.html

palmer_eldritch• 11 years ago

It feels like I'm reading opinions by creationists.
the most widely accepted explanation is that the symbol is the result of evolution

Well, maybe you are...

muyuu• 11 years ago

It's basically a Spanish symbol by all accounts, with plenty of evidence of usage prior to the Independence of the US. The "real de a ocho" remained legal currency in the US for many decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dollar

barrystaes2• 11 years ago

Isn't it "Dollar" because of the dutch "Daalder"?

agumonkey• 11 years ago

The history of human communication is wonderfully absurd. So much cryptic conflation (vocal or scriptural).

205guy• 11 years ago

Ugh, pop-journalism. Did anyone even wonder where the word Joachimthal came from that gave the dollar it's name? From my rudimentary German, I would guess [Saint] Joachim valley, in other words the location of the silver mine.

ajcarpy2005• 11 years ago

It may have evolved from the Kadusis symbol which is also used on medical stuff sometimes.

juiced• 11 years ago

Turns out that the Dollar (0.88 Euro), derived from the Dutch word Daalder, today has the exact same value as this Daalder (2.50 guilders) before it became the Euro (2.20371 guilders), after calculating the inflation rate.

bikamonki• 11 years ago

@ has a well known meaning in Spanish, it is the symbol of "arroba" which is an old unit of weight, like a pound, ounce, etc. I still remember hearing on the local markets sellers pricing their goods for its arroba weight. In fact, when we read an email out load we do not say someone at somwhere dot com, we say someone arroba somewhere dot com.

kragen• 11 years ago

It was commonly used in English in commercial correspondence, such as invoices, to separate a quantity from the unit price. I don't remember the exact notation, but it was something like 20#@$10 for "20 pounds at 10 dollars per pound." or "20@$10" for "20 items at 10 dollars each".

Anybody who can dig up an English-language B2B invoice from the 1950s or earlier?

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

And I remember than 'ampersand' is 'and per se and' from the alphabet song, where the 'and' sign used to be included at the end. Its been corrupted to the 'ampersand'. Any idea if there's any history behind that?

fnl• 11 years ago

Tyrol never was German (except when anexed by the Nazis, that is...). At most, it was part of the Ostrogothic kingdom (up to 550 or so); After, it was its own county, ruled by counts apointed by the Holy Roman Emperor, and then (1369, with the death of the last countess, Magarete Maultasch) it became part of the Kingdom of Austria that was being built by the house Habsburg. So by the time the silver mentioned in the article was found, Tyrol was firmly in Habsburg hands, and ever since has been part of Austria (particularly, the region with the silver).

Disclaimer: I am Tyrolean... :)

Why Is the Dollar Sign a Letter S?

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