SYM·0093 · Peso
Dollar
a Spanish coin’s monogram
- Unicode
- U+0024 dollar sign
- Meaning
- A unit of currency in some two dozen countries — none of which invented the mark.
- History
- It descends from the Spanish American peso, the piece of eight that served as the working silver currency of Atlantic trade. Merchants abbreviated pesos as ps, and in hurried ledgers the p and the s collapsed into one another until the loop of the p disappeared and a stroked S remained. The mark was in use before the United States adopted the dollar.
- Variants
- One stroke or two, with no difference in meaning; the two-stroke form is not older.
- Related
- £ ¥ ₹ the other currency plates.
- Appears
- Prices, spreadsheets, programming languages, and the shorthand for money in general.
- Evolution
- Merchant’s abbreviation → national currency mark → a generic sign for wealth.
Sources · 3
- documented Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notations, on the ps derivation traced through eighteenth-century merchant manuscripts.
- documented The Spanish American peso as the basis of the dollar, and its circulation in the Atlantic economy.
- folk That the strokes are the Pillars of Hercules, or a monogram of U over S for the United States. The second is impossible on dates alone; the first is decoration read backwards into a ledger abbreviation.