Dollar Sign

Dollar sign - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
3 Currencies that use the dollar or peso sign. 4 See also. 5 References ... The dollar sign may have also originated from Hermes, the Greek god of bankers, ...
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$The dollar sign or peso sign ($) is a symbol primarily used to indicate a unit of currency.

History The sign is attested in business correspondence between British North America and Mexico in the 1770s, as referring to the Spanish-Mexican peso.Lawrence Kinnaird: "The Western Fringe of Revolution", The Western Historical Quarterly. Vol. 7, No. 3 (Jul., 1976), page 259 The piastre was known as "Spanish dollar" in British North America, and in 1785, it was adopted as U.S. currency, together with both the term "dollar" and the $ sign. Interestingly, the first instance of the symbol on U.S.A. currency is on the reverse of a $1 coin first issued in February 2007, under the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005,Pub. L. No. 109-145, 119 Stat. 2664 (Dec. 22, 2005)..

The sign's ultimate origins are not certain"Note on Our Dollar Sign", Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Oct., 1939), pp. 57-58 , though it is widely accepted that it comes from the Spain coat of arms, which carries the two Pillars of Hercules and the motto Non Plus Ultra in the shape of an "S".

From the Spanish Coat of Arms engraved on the Spanish 'Real' with "S"-shapped ribbon in the Town Hall of Seville, (Spain) (16th century)The most widely accepted explanation is that the dollar sign derives from the Spanish coat of arms engraved on the Spanish colonial silver coins "Real de a Ocho" ("piece of eight") or Spanish dollar under circulation in the Spanish colonies of America and Asia, as well as in the English Thirteen Colonies and later the U.S. and Canada.

The Spanish coat of arms has two columns (] and an "S"-shapped ribbon around each, with the motto "Non Plus Ultra" originally, and later "Plus Ultra".Nussbaum, Arthur: A history of the dollar. New York : Columbia University Press, 1957.

In 1492, King Ferdinand II of Aragon put Gibraltar under the new joined rule of the Spain throne. He adopted the symbol of the Pillars of Hercules and added the List of Latin phrases Non plus ultra – meaning "and nothing further", indicating " is the end of the (known) world". But as Christopher Columbus in 1492 travelled to the Americas, the saying was changed to Plus Ultra (motto) – as there was more out there.Earl Rosenthal: "Plus Ultra, Non plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 34, 1971 (1971), pp. 204-228 This symbol was especially adopted by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and was a part of his coat of arms as a symbol of his American possessions and riches. When the Spanish conquistadores found gold and silver in the New World, Charles V's symbol was stamped on the coins made from these metals. These coins with the Pillars of Hercules over two Sphere (columnarios) were spread around America and Europe, and the symbol was ultimately adopted by the country that became the United States and by many of the continent other independent nations. Later on, salesmen wrote signs that, instead of saying dollar, had this handwriting symbol, and in turn this developed to the simple S with two vertical bars.

around the modern coat of arms of Spain.

There is also another theory that makes the sign derive from where "$" is a corruption of the letters "PS" or \mathrm{P}^\mathrm{S}, used as an abbreviation for pesos. Arthur S. Aiton; Benjamin W. Wheeler: "The First American Mint", The Hispanic American Historical Review. Vol. 11, No. 2 (May, 1931), pp. 198-215. "Origin of the $ Sign", US Bureau of Engraving and Printing website

Alternative origin hypotheses There are a number of alternative origin theories, with several degrees of verifiability and academic acceptance.

From 'US' That $ is a monogram of U and S, which was used as a mark on money bags issued by the United States Mint. The letters U and S superimposed resemble the historical double stroke "$" sign: the bottom of the 'U' disappears into the bottom curve of the 'S', leaving two vertical lines. This double stroke dollar sign has been used to refer to US Currency. Thus, the one stroke design may have been modified to the double stroke design to represent United States currency. This theory was largely popularized by the novel Atlas Shrugged by philosopher Ayn Rand. This theory does not consider the fact that the symbol was already in use in the time of the British colonies, when the term 'United States' did not exist yet.

From a symbol used on the Roman sestertius That the dollar sign harks back to the most important Roman coin, the Sestertius, which had the letters 'HS' as its currency sign. When superimposed, these letters form a dollar sign with two vertical strokes (the horizontal line of the 'H' merging into the 'S'). This theory is widely discarded, in spite of the tendency of neo-classic Roman Republic influences in styles evident in other early US government designs, such as the Capitol and Senate buidings.

The two pillars in the temple of Solomon That the two vertical lines represent the two cult pillars Boaz and Jachin in the original Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. This is based on the theory that Freemasonry symbols, such as the All Seeing Eye of God, appear on U.S. currency, which they did not in 1785.

From a sign used on the German Thaler That it derives from the symbol used on a German Thaler. According to Ovason (2004), on one type of thaler, one side showed the crucified Christ, and the other side showed a Snake hanging from a cross, and near the serpent's head the letters NU, and on the other side of the cross the number 21. This refers to the Bible, Numbers, chapter 21 (see Nehushtan).

Unit of Silver The dollar symbol was in use in colonial times before the American Revolution. Prices were often quoted in units of silver, as the Spanish "piece of eight" was in common use for payment of goods and services. When a price was quoted the capital 'S' was used to indicate silver with a capital 'U' written on top to indicate units. Eventually, the capital 'U' was replaced by double vertical hash marks.

Other theories Another possibility is that it derives from the British notation 8/ for eight shillings, referring to the Spanish 8 reales coin ("piece of eight"), which later became the USA dollar. Others derive it from the Portuguese Cifrão sign \mathrm{S}\!\!\!\Vert. Florian Cajori: "New Data on the Origin and Spread of the Dollar Mark", The Scientific Monthly. Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sep., 1929), pp. 212-216

A common explanation is that the symbol is derived from the numeral eight with a slash through it denoting "Spanish dollar." The Oxford English Dictionary prior to 1963 held that this was the most probable explanation, though later editions have placed this theory in doubt.

Still another explanation holds that the dollar sign is derived from (or at least inspired by) the mint mark on Spanish colonial silver coins ("Spanish real" or "Spanish dollar") that were minted in Potosí (in present day Bolivia). The mint mark was composed of the letters "PTSI" superimposed on one another, and bears an undeniable resemblance to the single-stroke dollar sign (see picture). The Potosí mine is generally accepted as having been the largest single silver mining in history. Silver coins minted in Potosí would have been in common use in colonial America, and its mint mark widely recognized.

First cast dollar symbol According to a plaque in the burgh of St Andrews in Scotland, the first dollar symbol was cast in a type-foundry in Philadelphia in 1797 that belonged to Scottish immigrant John Baine. John Baine had lodged in a house in South Street in St Andrews with Alexander Wilson (type-maker), the father of Scottish type-founding.

Use in computer programming As the dollar sign is one of the few symbols that is on the one hand almost universally present in computer character sets, but on the other hand rarely needed in its literal meaning within programming languages, the $ character has been used on computers for many purposes not related to money, including:

$ was used as a string terminator in CP/M and subsequently also in all versions of 86-DOS, PC-DOS, MS-DOS and derivatives (Int 21 with AH=09h)
$ signifies the end of a line or the file in text editors ed (text editor), ex (text editor), vi and derivatives, and consequently:
$ matches the end of a line or string in sed, grep, and POSIX and Perl regular expressions.
$ was used to define string (computer science) variables in older versions of the BASIC programming language ("$" was often pronounced "string" instead of "dollar" in this use).
$ is used to define hexadecimal constants in Pascal programming language-like languages as Delphi programming language.
$ is used to define variables in the PHP programming language and Scalar (computing) variables in the Perl programming language (see Sigil (computer programming)).
In most Shell scripts languages, $ is used to interpolate environment variables, special variables, arithmetic computations and special characters, and to perform translation of localised strings.
In UNIX-like systems the $ is often part of the command prompt, depending on the user's Shell (computing) and environment settings. For example, the default environment settings for the bash shell specify $ as part of the command prompt.
$ is used in the TeX typesetting to delimit mathematical regions.
$ is used by command prompt command in DOS to insert special sequences into the DOS command prompt string.
Formulas in Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets use $ to indicate an absolute cell reference.
$ is used as an equality sign in the programming language V--.

Currencies that use the dollar or peso sign In addition to those countries of the world that use dollars or pesos, a number of other countries use the symbol $ to denote their currencies, including, but not limited to:

Except the Philippine peso, whose sign is written as .

Some currencies use the cifrão (\mathrm{S}\!\!\!\Vert ), similar to the dollar sign, but always with two strokes:

Brazilian real
Cape Verde escudo
Portuguese escudo (defunct)

The cifrão is also currently used to account for over 130,000,000 domestic standard US Mint (1986+) bullion US silver dollars as one dollar per one troy ounce fine (99.9%), thereby avoiding confusion with debased US trade dollar-denominated tokens and Federal Reserve Notes.

See also

References

- contains section on the history of the dollar sign, with much documentary evidence supporting the "pesos" theory.

Dollar sign - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The dollar sign or peso sign ($) is a symbol primarily used to indicate a unit of currency.

Dollar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The dollar (often represented by the dollar sign: "$") is the name of the official currency in several countries, dependencies and other regions.

Origin and history of the Word Dollar and Dollar Sign
An outline of the origins of the word dollar and the sign and the history and geography of dollar currencies.

AskOxford: What is the origin of the dollar sign ($)?
Many suggestions have been made about the origin of the dollar symbol $, one of the commonest being that it derives from the figure 8, representing the Spanish 'piece of eight

AskOxford: dollar sign
dollar sign (also dollar mark) • noun the sign &buck;, representing a dollar. Perform another search of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary

dollar sign definition of dollar sign in the Free Online Encyclopedia.
The dollar sign ($) is sometimes used to indicate a hexadecimal number. For example, $3E0 is the hex number 3E0. In the Unix world, all Unix shells support the use of the $ as a ...

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dollar from FOLDOC
dollar < character > "$" Common names: ITU-T: dollar sign. Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string; escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; INTERCAL: big money.

AUE: FAQ excerpt: Origin of the dollar sign
This is a fast-access FAQ excerpt.] It is sometimes said that the dollar sign's origin is a narrow "U" superimposed over a wide "S", "U.S." being short for "United States.

dollar sign - Hutchinson encyclopedia article about dollar sign
dollar. Monetary unit of several countries, containing 100 cents. In the USA, the dollar was adopted in 1785. US dollars originally were issued as gold or silver coins; today both ...