How did coins get their names?

One can bank on the fact that most coins derive from Latin words and are named after people, places, or things. Even the word coin translates from the Latin "cuneus," meaning wedge, because early coins ressembled the wedges the dies used to coin coins. The cent which derives from the Latin "centum," meaning one hundred, the dime from the Latin "decimus," meaning tenth, and the French franc from the Latin "Franconium Rex," meaning King of the Franks, are all examples of the naming of money, the root of all evil, which translates from the Latin word "mona," meaning to warn!

Weight - Metal - Location - Crowns - Heroes

Physical weight was another manner in which people named their coins. The English pound translates from the Latin "pondo" meaning pound, or, to get more heavily into detail, from the Latin "libra pondo" meaning a pound of weight. This method of naming coins weighed heavily in naming of the Spanish peso and of the Italian lira. A sense of fairness dictates that some coins bear the names of the metals of which they are composed. Thus, the nickel is made of nickel. Location sometimes figures prominently into the naming of some coins. The dollar, not always in paper form, originally hailed from the silver mines of Bohemia, where Bohemians extracted silver for the coins and minted them in the town of Joachimsthal. Realizing that the coin they termed the Joachimsthaler, short of lacking in creativity, was rather lengthy, our Bohemian friends lost the head of the name and kept the tail, with the end result being the thaler. The thaler eventually lost its lisp and became the dollar.

Many countries used their word for crown, for example, crown, sovereign, krone, krun, krone, corona (not the beer), to demonstrate that some crown authority initially granted permission to mint them. Other countries named coins in honor of their heros, such as the Panamanian balboa, after the explorer Balboa, the Venezuelan bolivar, after one of it's national heros, and the Peruvian sol, also not a beer, but the Spanish word for sun, after this ancient Incan object of worship.

A Word About Money

Many of the words we associate with money today come from ancient uses of currency. Examining where these words came from helps us understand how currency systems developed.

Buck - Early settlers in North America relied heavily on the skin of the deer for trade. Each skin was referred to as a buck
Pecuniary - This modern word means, "relating to money." It comes from the Latin word pecus, which means cattle
Fee - This word comes from the German word for cattle, vieh
Shell out - The use of shells as currency among Native Americans, and, later, the European colonists, led to the phrase "shell out," meaning "to pay"
Salary - This is another money-related word we got from the Romans. At one point, Roman soldiers were paid part of their wages in salt. The Latin word salarium means "of salt"

Ancient and Medieval coin names