Looking for a word - please

[wordsthatwill]

Perhaps one of you logophiles can help me. Does anyone know if there is a word for $$$ other than dollar sign?
Thanks in advance. Lillian

[Brazilian dude]

In Portuguese we call it cifrão. Maybe there's something similar in English?

Brazilian dude

[Perry]

A quick Googling will yield scads of hits on the origin of the sign (and of the word dollar), but no name for the dollar sign.

[gailr]

I've worked with the printed page for some time, now, and have yet to encounter a term other than "dollar sign" for this symbol.
-gailr

[hotshoe]

On a tangent, old English currency consisted of Pounds, shillings and pence - pennies to you Philistines -, the symbols for which were L, s and d. The "d" came from the Latin "denarius", for "penny", but the origin of the "L", which cannot be properly produced with my limited computer skills, escapes me.

Anyone?

[gailr]

Search with the proper keywords and ye shall find...this:

The history of the dollar is a story involving many countries in different continents. The word dollar is much older than the American unit of currency. It is an Anglicised form of "thaler", (pronounced taler, with a long "a"), the name given to coins first minted in 1519 from locally mined silver in Joachimsthal in Bohemia.

The Shilling Abbreviation Theory
There is a view, held by some typographers, that the dollar symbol derives from the abbreviation for the shilling, s, which was used in Britain, both as a coin and as a monetary unit, until decimalisation in 1971. A stroke through a letter was sometimes used to indicate that the letter was an abbreviation. The classic example of this is the British pound symbol £ which is a cursive capital L with a stroke through it. The pound symbol is derived from the Latin word for a pound weight, libra, since a pound of silver was the standard on which the monetary unit was based. In the case of the shilling the stroke through the s would have had an added significance.

Until 1971 when Britain divided the pound into 100 (new) pennies and abandoned the old sub-units, two different methods of representing the shilling were used; one was simply the letter s and the other was the oblique slash / which is also known as a solidus, the name of the Roman coin from which the shilling is derived. Actually the slash or solidus was used to separate shillings from pence when sums of money were written down, e.g. 4/6 for four shillings and sixpence. (For an amount consisting of an integral number of shillings a dash indicated zero pence, e.g. 3/- for three shillings).

If you make the slash or solidus vertical and combine it with the S you end up with $ - the dollar sign.

...with links to similar websites.
-gailr

[Stargzer]

10/6



Mad as a Hatter, or maybe a March Hare

My, isn't Alice a bit grumpy-looking there?

[George Campbell]

On a tangent, old English currency consisted of Pounds, shillings and pence - pennies to you Philistines -, the symbols for which were L, s and d. The "d" came from the Latin "denarius", for "penny", but the origin of the "L", which cannot be properly produced with my limited computer skills, escapes me.

Anyone?

The pound sign L stands for Latin "libra" which means pound. Sorry to answer so late but just now noticed your message.

[brogine]

This is cheating but . . . "peso sign."

[LukeJavan8]

Very old thread, but,
we can add the "e" with the strike through it for EURO.

[thejazzgirl]

Earlier someone stated currency and I think that is as close as it gets, UNLESS we are doing a little shopping in Mexico. Although a U.S. dollar may be preferred over their Peso. ($)

I just noticed peso has been posted. I'm not so bright after-all.