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Dollar sign

Monetary symbol used in many national currencies

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The sign is also used in several compound currency symbols, such as the Brazilian real (R$) and the United States dollar (US$): in local use, the nationality prefix is usually omitted. In countries that have other currency symbols, the US dollar is often assumed and the "US" prefix omitted.

The one- and two-stroke versions are often considered mere stylistic (typeface) variants, although in some places and epochs one of them may have been specifically assigned, by law or custom, to a specific currency. The Unicode computer encoding standard defines a single code for both.

In most English-speaking countries that use that symbol, it is placed to the left of the amount specified, e.g. "$1", read as "one dollar".

History

Early history

How the dollar sign came to represent the Spanish American peso is uncertain. There are several competing hypotheses:

  • The most widely accepted theory holds that among the very many latinate scribal abbreviations the dollar sign developed out of an abbreviation for the Spanish and Spanish-American ps for pesos. A study of late 18th- and early 19th-century manuscripts shows that the s gradually came to be written over the p, developing into a close equivalent to the '$' mark. Oliver Pollock, a wealthy Irish trader and early supporter of the American Revolution, used the abbreviation "ps", sometimes run together in a way that almost exactly resembled the dollar sign, in a letter dated 1778. There are documents showing the common use of the two-stroke version in Portugal already by 1775.
  • Another hypothesis derives the sign from a depiction of the Pillars of Hercules, a classical symbol for two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, with a ribbon wrapped around each pillar (or both pillars) in the form of an 'S'. This device is a support element of the Spanish coat of arms, and appeared on the most common real de ocho coins circulating at the time in the Americas and Europe; namely, those minted at the Potosí mint in Bolivia, which operated from 1573–1825. Indeed, one of the names used for Spanish dollars in Qing Dynasty China was 雙柱; Shuāngzhù; 'double-pillar'.
  • A variant of the above theory claims that the sign comes from the mark of the mint at Potosí, where a large portion of the Spanish Empire's silver was mined. A feature on these coins were the letters "P T S I" superimposed. The core of this monogram is a (single-stroked) '$' sign.
  • Yet another hypothesis notes that the English word "dollar" for the Spanish piece of eight originally came (through Dutch daalder) from Joachimsthaler or thaler, a similar large German silver coin that was widely used in Europe. It is therefore conjectured that the dollar sign derived from a symbol consisting of a superimposing 'S' and 'I' or 'J' that was used to denote the German silver coin. de Roover (1945) notes that such a symbol used for that dollar unit appears in the 1686 edition of An Introduction to Merchants' Accounts by John Collins printed at the end of Gerard de Malynes’ Lex Mercatoria and was also used for the mark (Hamburg mark banco) in particular in the first half of the 19th century. Alternatively, the symbol could have come from a snake and cross emblem on the thaler coins.

Less likely theories

The following theories seem to have been discredited or contradicted by documentary evidence:

  • James Alton James proposed that the symbol with two strokes was adapted from a 1778 design by financier Robert Morris, found in his letters to Pollock.
  • Henrietta Larson suggested that the sign could derive from a combination of the Greek character "psi" (ψ) and 'S'.
  • Another theory claims that the sign started off as a monogram of "US", with a narrow 'U' superimposed on the 'S'; the bottom part of the 'U' would have been lost, producing the dollar sign with two vertical lines. Florian Cajori found this theory mentioned in 1876 letters to the journal Notes and Queries. Henry R. Towne begins his 1886 essay on management stating this theory. This was also claimed by Ayn Rand in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged; in Rand's conjecture is that the "US" monogram was imprinted on the money bags used by the United States Mint.
  • Seijas & Frederick (2017), pp. 3–4 noted that the captors of slaves in Spanish territories sometimes branded enslaved people with a symbol very similar to a one-barred dollar sign. Esclavo is Spanish for "slave," and clavo means nail. A dollar sign would then be 'S' + clavo, ('Ꞌ').
  • A theory often cited in Portuguese speaking countries is that the 'S' part of the doubly-stroked sign is a schematic representation of the path followed by the Umayyad Caliphate general Tariq Ibn Ziyad in his conquest of the Visigoth kingdom in 711 CE, and the two strokes represent the Pillars of Hercules that he would have crossed along that path. That symbol would have been engraved in coins commemorating his victory, and then became symbolic of currency in general.
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the hypothesis that the symbol is derived from the Arabic numeral "8" in reference to the Spanish dollar or "piece of eight" as a "popular theory" for which there is a lack of documentary evidence.

1770s - present

The symbol appears in business correspondence in the 1770s from the West Indies referring to the Spanish American peso, also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in British America. The Spanish coins provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792, and for the larger coins of the new Spanish American republics, such as the Mexican peso, Argentine peso, Peruvian real, and Bolivian sol coins.

With the Coinage Act of 1792, the United States Congress created the U.S. dollar, defining "each to be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current" but a variety of foreign coins were deemed to be legal tender until the Coinage Act of 1857 ended this status.

The earliest U.S. dollar coins did not have any dollar symbol. The first occurrence in print is claimed to be from 1790s, by a Philadelphia printer Archibald Binny, creator of the Monticello typeface. The $1 United States Note issued by the United States in 1869 included a large symbol consisting of a 'U' with the right bar overlapping an 'S' like a single-bar dollar sign, as well as a very small double-stroke dollar sign in the legal warning against forgery see picture.

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