Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Origin of... Dollar Sign

When the U.S. government begin issuing its own money in 1794, it used the common world currency - the peso - also called the Spanish dollar.

The first American silver dollars were identical to Spanish pesos in weight and value, so they took the same written abbreviations: Ps.

That evolved into a P with an s written right on top of it, and when people began to omit the circular part of the p, the sign simply became an S with a vertical line through it.

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