Dollar

One Sarawak dollar from 1935, featuring Charles Vyner Brooke, the 3rd and last White Rajah of Sarawak

• Confederate States of America: The Confederate States dollar issued from March 1861 to 1865
• Ethiopia: The name "Ethiopian dollar" was used in the English text on the birr banknotes before the Derg takeover in 1974.
• Malaysia: the Malaysian ringgit used to be called the "Malaysian Dollar". The surrounding territories (that is, Malaya, British North Borneo, Sarawak, Brunei, and Singapore) used several varieties of dollars (for example, Straits dollar, Malayan dollar, Sarawak dollar, British North Borneo dollar; Malaya and British Borneo dollar) before Malaya, British North Borneo, Sarawak, Singapore and Brunei gained their independence from the United Kingdom. See also for a complete list of currencies.
• Sierra Leone: The Sierra Leonean dollar was used from 1791 to 1805. It was subdivided into 100 cents and was issued by the Sierra Leone Company. The dollar was pegged to sterling at a rate of 1 dollar = 4 shillings 2 pence.
• Spain: the Spanish dollar (from 1497 to 1868) is closely related to the dollars (Spanish dollar was used in USA until 1857) and euros used today.
• Rhodesia: the Rhodesian dollar replaced the Rhodesian pound in 1970 and it was used until Zimbabwe came into being in 1980.
• Republic of Texas: the Texas dollar was issued between January 1839 and September 1840.
• Zimbabwe: once used the Zimbabwe dollar, but abolished it and now uses the South African rand, the US dollar,[5] the Euro, the Pound sterling, the Botswana pula, the Chinese yuan, the Indian rupee and the Japanese yen.[6]

On 15 January 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began minting coins from silver mined locally in Joachimsthal and marked on reverse with the Bohemian lion. The coins would be named joachimsthaler after the town, becoming shortened in common usage to thaler or taler. The town itself derived its name from Saint Joachim, whereby the German word Thal (Tal in modern spelling) means 'valley' (cf. the English term dale).[7]

This name found its way into other languages, for example:[8]

• German — Thaler (or Taler)
• Czech and Slovak — tolar
• Low German — daler
• Dutch — rijksdaalder (or daler),
• Danish and Norwegian — rigsdaler
• Swedish — riksdaler
• Spanish - Spanish dólar (real de a ocho or Peso duro)
• Ethiopian — talari (ታላሪ )
• English — dollar

Compared to other languages which adopted the second part of word joachimsthaler, the first part found its way into Russian language and became efimok, yefimok (ефимок).[9]

A later Dutch coin also depicting a lion was called the leeuwendaler or leeuwendaalder, literally 'lion daler'. The Dutch Republic produced these coins to accommodate its booming international trade. The leeuwendaler circulated throughout the Middle East and was imitated in several German and Italian cities. This coin was also popular in the Dutch East Indies and in the Dutch New Netherland Colony (New York). It was in circulation throughout the Thirteen Colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries and was popularly known as lion (or ) dollar.[10][11] The currencies of Romania and Bulgaria are, to this day, leu or lev ('lion'). The modern American-English pronunciation of dollar is still remarkably close to the 17th century Dutch pronunciation of daler.[12] Some well-worn examples circulating in the Colonies were known as "dog dollars."[13]

Spanish pesos – having the same weight and shape – came to be known as Spanish dólar.[12][14] By the mid-18th century, the lion dollar had been replaced by Spanish dollar, the famous "pieces of eight", which were distributed widely in the Spanish colonies in the New World and in the Philippines.[14][15][16][17][18]

The quantity of silver chosen in 1792 to correspond to one dollar, namely, 371.25 grains of pure silver, is very close to the geometric mean of one troy pound and one pennyweight. In what follows, "dollar" will be used as a unit of mass. A troy pound being 5760 grains 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.[31]

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).

The actual process of defining the US silver dollar had nothing to do with any geometric mean. The US government simply sampled all Spanish milled dollars in circulation in 1792 and arrived at the average weight in common use. And this was 371.25 grains of fine silver.

There are two quotes in the plays of William Shakespeare referring to dollars as money. Coins known as "thistle dollars" were in use in Scotland during the 16th and 17th centuries,[32] and use of the English word, and perhaps even the use of the coin, may have begun at the University of St Andrews[33] This might be supported by a reference to the sum of "ten thousand dollars" in Macbeth (act I, scene II) (an anachronism because the real Macbeth, upon whom the play was based, lived in the 11th century). In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1891[34], an Englishman posing as a London beggar describes the shillings and pounds he collected as dollars.

In 1804, a British five-shilling piece, or crown, was sometimes called "dollar". It was an overstruck Spanish eight real 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 the Napoleonic Wars, hence their re-use by the Bank of England. They remained in use until 1811.[35][36] During World War II, when the U.S. dollar was (approximately) valued at five shillings, the half crown (2s 6d) acquired the nickname "half dollar" in the UK.

Chinese demand for silver in the 19th and early 20th centuries led several countries, notably the United Kingdom, United States and Japan, to mint trade 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.

Other national currencies called "dollar"

A New Zealand one-dollar coin

500 old Zimbabwean dollar bill of the first Zimbabwean dollar

A 100 billion dollars special agro-cheque issued during the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

Prior to 1873, the silver dollar circulated in many parts of the world, with a value in relation to the British gold sovereign of roughly $1 = 4s 2d (21p approx). As a result of the decision of the German Empire to stop minting silver thaler coins in 1871, in the wake of the Franco-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 and Newfoundland 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, particularly Latin America and the Far East. By 1900, value of silver dollars had fallen to 50 percent of gold dollars. Following the abandonment of the gold standard by Canada in 1931, the Canadian dollar began to drift away from parity with the U.S. dollar. It returned to parity a few times, but since the end of the Bretton 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 and South East Asia began to diverge from each other as well during the course of the 20th century. The Straits 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 and Hong Kong came off the silver standard, the Straits dollar was worth 2s 4d (11.5p approx) sterling, whereas the Hong Kong dollar was worth only 1s 3d sterling (6p approx).

The term "dollar" has also been adopted by other countries for currencies which do not share a common history with other dollars. Many of these currencies adopted the name after moving from a £sd-based to a decimalized monetary system. Examples include the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar, the Jamaican dollar, the Cayman Islands dollar, the Fiji dollar, the Namibian dollar, the Rhodesian dollar, the Zimbabwe dollar, and the Solomon Islands dollar.

• The tala is based on the Samoan pronunciation of the word "dollar".
• The Slovenian tolar had the same etymological origin as dollar (that is, thaler).

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dollar.

• (in English) Etymonline (word history). for buck; Etymonline (word history) for dollar
• (in English) Currency converter. CNNMoney.com