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Concerning the Ancestry of the Dollar Sign

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Florence Edler de Roover
Florence Edler de Roover
Affiliation:
Aurora, New York.
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Extract

Among the numerous explanations offered for the origin of the American dollar sign, no one seems to have raised the question of whether the dollar sign may have the same ancestry as the word “dollar.” There is no doubt about the etymology of “dollar.” It is derived from the German word Thaler, through the Dutch daalder. Furthermore, it is certain that Thaler is an abbreviation of Joachimsthaler.

Type
Other
Information
Business History Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 1945 , pp. 63 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1945

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References

1 See “Note on Our Dollar Sign,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, vol. xiii, no. 4 (Oct., 1939), pp. 57–58Google Scholar.

2 Shepard Pond, “The Spanish Dollar,” ibid., vol. xv, no. 1 (Feb., 1941), pp. 12-16.

3 Ibid., p. 14.

4 The sample account containing this sign is called “A Controversial Partable Accompt between 3 Turkey Merchants.” It is near the end of Collins' treatise, which is without regular pagination.

5 The sign, was still used in the first half of the nineteenth century—no longer for Thaler but for the Hamburg mark banco. See Porter, Kenneth Wiggins, The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765-1844 (Harvard Studies in Business History, Cambridge, Mass., 1937), vol. ii, pp. 1367–1370CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Cajori, Florian, History of Mathematical Notations (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1929), vol. ii, pp. 22–25Google Scholar.