Thursday 21 June 2012

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The dollar (often represented by the dollar sign $) is the name of the official currency or a banknote of many countries, territories and dependencies, including Australia, Belize, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States.
The word dollar is much older than the American unit of currency. It is an Anglicised form of "thaler", (pronounced taler, with a long "a"), the name given to coins first minted in 1519 from locally mined silver in Joachimsthal in Bohemia. (Today the town of Joachimsthal lies within the borders of the Czech republic and its Czech name is Jáchymov). Thaler is a shortened form of the term by which the coin was originally known - Joachimsthaler.
Later on the English version of the name (dollar) was also applied to similar coins, not only ones minted in central Europe but also the Spanish peso and the Portuguese eight-real piece. Both these large silver coins were practically identical in weight and fineness. Today we are familiar with the phrase pieces of eight from tales of pirates in the Caribbean.
Those coins, particularly the Spanish peso or dollar circulated widely in Britain's North American colonies because of a shortage of official British coins. That is why, after the United States gained its independence the new nation chose "dollar" as the name of its currency instead of keeping the pound.
n 15 January 1520, the Bohemian Count Hieronymus Schlick (Czech: Jeroným Šlik z Passounu) began minting coins known as Joachimsthaler, named for Joachimsthal (modern Jáchymov in the Czech Republic), where the silver was mined. (In German, thal or tal refers to a valley or dale.) "Joachimsthaler" was later shortened in common usage to taler or thaler (same pronunciation) and this shortened word eventually found its way into other languages: Czech tolar, Danish and Norwegian (rigs)daler, Swedish (riks)daler, Icelandic dalur, Dutch (rijks)daalder, Ethiopian  Italian tallero, Flemish daelder, Polish Talar, Persian Dare, as well as into English as dollar The coins minted at Joachimsthal soon lent their name to other coins of similar size and weight from other places. One such example, the Dutch lion dollar, circulated throughout the Middle East and was imitated in several German and Italian cities. Carried by Dutch traders, this coin was also popular in the Dutch East Indies as well as in the Dutch New Netherland Colony (New York), and circulated throughout the Thirteen Colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Some well-worn examples circulating in the Colonies were known as "dog dollars".By the mid-18th century, the lion dollar had been replaced by Spanish dollar, the famous "piece of eight," which were distributed widely in the Spanish colonies in the New World and in the Philippines.Pieces of eight (so-called because they were worth eight "reals") became known as "Spanish dollars" in the English-speaking world because of their similarity in size, weight and composition to the earlier thaler coins.
The sign is first attested in business correspondence in the 1770s as a scribal abbreviation "ps", referring to the Spanish American peso,that is, the "Spanish dollar" as it was known in British North America. These late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century manuscripts show that the s gradually came to be written over the p 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.
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