¹ The application of a weight name to a coin is not unusual, for example: pound (English), livre (French), mark (German), onsa (Italian).

² The word “dollar” appears several times in Shakespeare. In its career the piece of eight had many names, such as peso, peso de a ocho, peso duro, duro, peso fuerte, piastre, matten (in the Dutch East Indies, from Malay mateo, meaning measure), thaler, dollar, tallero, pillar dollar, colonnato (in the Orient), and Shanghai dollar.

³ Those familiar with our Colonial and Continental paper money will remember its numerous and often odd denominations based sometimes on the local currencies and sometimes on the Spanish milled dollar.

⁴ In the sense that the dollar became the basic unit for a decimal monetary system. In 1776 Congress had divided the Spanish dollar into 90 pence (Pennsylvania currency), New York rated it at 96 pence, while in New England it passed for 72 pence Massachusetts currency.

⁵ By the middle of the nineteenth century the general adoption of decimal currency denominations in Europe led most of Latin America to take the same action. Mexico was the last country to abandon the real when in 1890 she decimalized the Mexican dollar. The great rise in the price of silver after the end of the World War in 1918 made Mexican dollars worth more as bullion than as money with the result that, like England, Mexico debased her silver coins, and the old-fashioned standard Mexican dollar, child of the Spanish dollar, entered the ghostly realm of historic coins.