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.<<
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
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.
You can't easily change $20.00 to $200.00. You could try changing it to $20.000.00, but that would probably overflow whatever box it's written in, since the amount is usually right-justified to begin with.
The decimal point protects the right edge of the amount, while the dollar sign protects the left edge.
Similarly, when people write out a number in English on a check, they often write "Twenty dollars only", not just "Twenty dollars", in order to prevent other words from being added to the end, e.g. "Twenty dollars and a hundred". (There's a nursery rhyme that goes "four and twenty blackbirds", so writing the smaller number first is clearly not unheard of.)
For anything under 100, in German and Dutch the least significant number goes first: one and thirty, eight and ninety. 100 and above goes before that, so 121 is 'one hundred one and twenty'. The nursery rhyme might be inspired by that, or maybe there was something similar in English back in the day, but either way - I'd say it's highly unusual to put those numbers in that order in English.
This is getting tangential, but the French way of counting seems to be even more strange with certain numbers. 93 is "quatre-vingt-treize", i.e. "four-twenties-and-thirteen".
(Except in Belgium and Switzerland and this-one-valley-in-Italy et cetera, where it is just "nonante-trois".)
Compared to that, "drei-und-neunzig" is still not bad.
Apparently it was common in the south as well. Some writer who was fined in the 19th Century then lampooned the magistrate as "Monsieur Nonante-Cinque", the fine having been 95 francs.
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 $200.00 is harder to alter than 200.00$ .
Luckily, though, it is common to use commas to separate groups of three digits: $200,000.00 But this means a change of a factor 1000 which might be less useful than the original 20$ -> 320$ example.
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.
Sure, it's outdated now, but habits of accounting tend to die hard.
In Chinese, some characters representing numbers are so trivially forgible by adding a stroke or two (1 = 一, 2 = 二, 3 = 三, 10 = 十, 1000 = 千) that accountants came up with complicated substitutes that cannot be altered to mean any other number (1 = 壹, 2 = 贰, 3 = 叁, 10 = 拾, 1000 = 仟). The substitutes are still widely used in legal and financial documents.
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.
Possibly. As I recall, he was pretty upset about it, which seems to suggest it happened to him -- but it was a long time ago, and we all know memory is a funny thing.
>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."
One of my first jobs, I was tasked with spray painting the price (99 cents each) of landscape timbers on a big pile of uh, landscape timbers. I painted '.99 c', and my boss said, you just gave them away for less than a penny. It is hard to un-spray paint a dot, lessen learned FOREVER.
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."
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)
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 "$2m" has to get rewritten for the speech engine. It's like a middle-endian notation.
I came to the comment section exactly for this. I've fought with my kids and showed them unit algebra (5$/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.
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.
Sparrow missiles are pretty fast - they go at 2.5 Mach. I tried to take a photo, but it was too washed out as my stop was set at 32f. I was so angry with the camera, I dissolved it in my acid bath, which was 1.4pH.
That'll teach me, I guess, for taking photos near Area 51 :)
You may have nailed it - apart from 'area 51', which is a proper name (and whose order I messed up to make the joke, unfortunately), the others are all ratios, not discrete units.
On the other hand, it's also worth noticing that scientific units come from science, but monetary units come from finance. The regularised SI system is only a couple of hundred years old, and ledger entries are much older. My guess is that merchants in ye olde Europe had to deal with a variety of currencies, and putting the currency first was convention. It may have also made it clearer in a manifest as to which column was cost and which was amount, in an era when weights and measures were highly varied. Absolutely no supporting data for this, just a hunch :)
Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Granted in advertisements and billboards you'll often see the € sign suffixed in small, or just left out entirely, but i dont base my norm on advertisements.
When suffexed, i mostly see "EUR" or "EURO" used instead of the € symbol: 123,40 EUR.
> Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40.
Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK)
By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro)
That table claims it follows the value in Germany, that is not entirely correct.
Colloquially, EUR values are expressed with the currency symbol following the value, but in nearly all business correspondence (i.e. invoices, contracts, etc), it is actually prefixed and in many cases (likely for historical compatibility reasons) spelled out.
In other words, in day-to-day use you'd likely see this:
123,40 €
In more formal situations and invoices you'd expect this:
EUR 123,40
I'm not sure whether this split pre-dates the Euro. I recall seeing "DM 123,40" before the Euro, but I was too young to pay much attention to that kind of thing. Most signage used "123,40 DM" or even "12 Pf." (for Pfennig, the equivalent of cents) or left it off entirely, I think.
My guess is that it comes from the order typically used for ledgers, which is Description followed by Quantity. So you might have a ship's manifest with entries like:
| sacks of barley | 130 |
| kegs of wine | 12 |
| pesos de ocha | 2,800 |
So the abbreviation Ps starts out on the left-hand-side too.
Funny: when movies in English are dubbed to Spanish, the Latin expression is expanded and translated also, placed before the number: "era el año del Señor 1212 cuando...". It sounds good as if it were an archaism (the normal way of speaking is "1212 después de cristo" or 1212 DC).
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.
note my choice of words "wherever you can get away with it" :-)
because I do take those situations into account. if it would cause a problem with others I don't do it. in my own notes or when dealing with others whose brains I know can handle it, I do.
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
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.
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.
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.
[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 ...
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 $) is very much in favor of the superimposed PS.
Personally, I would think there's some kind of inheritance from the older Lira (later pound) sign "£". Remarkably, this one is also coming in two variants, both with a single and a (probably older) double stroke. (Unicode U+00A3 and U+00A4 respectively.) A letter with a horizontal or vertical stroke became somewhat of a universal signature of a currency symbol (think of cents, Yen, &c).
[Edit:] Also, consider the former predominance of the version featuring two distinctive vertical strokes, as lined out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018366 . A "P" with a doubled vertical stroke would just make a (mirrored) paragraph sign. But I confess not to know, what the original version would have been (single or double stroke).
[Edit:] Another hint on "$" 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.
I wouldn't contest this (a pesos being a piece of eight or a Spanish dollar). I would muse, given a 1700 years history of currency symbols denoted by a letter with an extra stroke (or, in some rare cases, as a letter with a hook, like the Florin), it would be a bit strange that the sign for the pesos/dollar would have originated in a totally independent evolution of its own. (The octopus eye of currency symbols?) It seems more likely that a proper sign with a stroke was sought for and the reverse of the coin would have been of some assistance. The "Ps" would have been a different usage, like the concurrent use of "ƒ" and "Fl" for Florin/G(o)ulden, non-withstanding mixed interpretations. (But this is just my opinion.)
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.
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.
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.
@ 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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
"Alternatively, the $ symbol derives from the scroll on the pillar, on the reverse of the "pillar dollar" variety of pieces of eight [Spanish Dollars]."
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
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.
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:
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"
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).
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?
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.
"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."
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.)
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.
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).
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.
>>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.
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.
The pound in particular is very old, and the practice of using a crossbar on the ascender of a letter to mark an abbreviation dates back to medieval times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation#Suspension). In fact, given the proximity of the British pound's creation and the period during which these abbreviations were at their peak, it seems to me to be possible that the British pound was the first still-extant currency symbol that was a letter with a dash through it, nearly a thousand years earlier. I don't know if that would have formed a convention though.
The dollar is entirely different, and is essentially just a peso sign.
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.
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.
"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.
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