It is only appropriate that an Irish immigrant to the United States be the one credited with originating the dollar sign. Oliver Pollock sailed the high seas at the age of twenty-three, and settled in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This young entrepreneur rapidly established himself as a wealthy and influential West Indies trader.

Pollock moved his operation to Louisiana, where he amassed even more wealth as a trader, and as a plantation owner. His success enabled him to provide supplies to the Patriots’ cause in the Revolutionary War, and to maintain close contact and a degree of influence with Congress. Pollock’s success allowed him easily to purchase military supplies to support “the cause,” as the Spanish Empire had an outpost in New Orleans, Louisiana. In his dealings with the Spaniards, Pollock used their currency, the peso.

In true Spanish tradition, Pollock used an abbreviation for pesos, yet his penmanship made the abbreviation appear to be the transposition of the letters “p” and “s.”

Prior to 1775, the fledgling nations monetary system was in disarray, and needed to be revamped. By 1775, Congress decided to rectify the situation by backing all of its legal tender with the most commonly circulated coins that were, coincidentally, Spanish coins minted in the New World. Americans then began trading with “Spanish milled dollars,” later termed “dollars,” as Americans shed the “pounds” that were the vestiges of British rule.

Congressman Robert Morris, to whom Pollock addressed his billing records, perpetuated the use of the dollar sign, and was the first high government official to give his blessing to the “s” with the two lines through it.

The appearance of the dollar sign in print, in a 1797 book by Chauncey Lee, signified the acceptance of the dollar as a purely American symbol, much as is the bald eagle. And, no, the dollar sign formed by placing the letter “U” over the letter “S” is not an abbreviation for Uncle Sam, as some have suggested!

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One can bank on the fact that most coins derive from Latin words, and are named after people, places, or things.

Even the word coin, translates from the Latin “cuneus,” meaning wedge, and was thusly named because early coins ressembled the wedges the dies used to coin coins. Our cent, from the Latin “centum,” meaning one hundred, our dime, from the Latin “decimus,” meaning tenth, and the French franc, from the Latin “Franconium Rex,” meaning King of the Franks, are all examples of the naming of money, the root of all evil, which translates from the Latin word “mona,” meaning to warn!

On to a more weighty manner in which people named coins, that being physical weight. The English pound, translates from the Latin “pondo,” meaning pound, or, to get more heavily into detail, from the Latin “libra pondo,” meaning a pound of weight. This method of naming coins weighed heavily in naming of the Spanish peso and of the Italian lira.

A sense of fairness dictates that some coins bear the names of the metals of which they are composed. Thus, our nickel is made of nickel. Location, not Latin, sometimes figures prominently into the naming of sum (oops!), some coins. Our very own dollar, not always in paper form, originally hailed from the silver mines of Bohemia, where Bohemians extracted silver for the coins, and minted them in the town of Joachimsthal. Realizing that the coin they termed the Joachimsthaler, short of lacking in creativity, was rather lengthy, our Bohemian friends lost the head of the name, and kept the tail, with the end result being the thaler. The thaler eventually lost its lisp, and became our dollar.

Many countries used their word for crown, for example, crown, sovereign, krone, krun, krone, corona (not the beer), to demonstrate that some crown authority initially granted permission to mint them. Other countries named coins in honor of their heros, such as the Panamanian balboa, after the explorer Balboa, the Venezuelan bolivar, after one of it’s national heros, and the Peruvian sol, also not a beer, but the Spanish word for sun, after this ancient Incan object of worship.

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