Where did the ‘$’ symbol come from?
There is quite a debate over how the '$' symbol came about.
Thought I would give a bit of trivia today, rather than a tip. If someone asks you where the U.S. dollar sign ($) symbol originated, now you can actually answer them!
The September 2009 issue of T. Rowe Price Investor Magazine has a short article on this exact topic.
Turns out that there isn’t complete agreement on the topic (sounds like Congress–haha). One popular theory is that the symbol comes from superimposing the ‘U’ and ‘S’ in United States, and eventually discarded the bottom of the ‘U’ over time. However, this theory is unlikely because the use of the dollar sign actually predates our independence from England.
Other theories involve the evolution of the symbol for the Spanish peso, called the “piastre”, which was widely used prior to July 4, 1776. Pesos were commonly referred to as “pesos de ocho” or “pieces of eight”, because a Spanish dollar could be split into eight monetary units called reales. One Spanish coin had a mark of ‘8′ between two pillars, and historians theorize that the two pillars were superimposed over the ‘8′ eventually lead to the ‘$’ we have today.
Other historians theorize that the ‘$’ is from a combination of ‘P’ and ‘8′ (for “pieces of eight”) or “R” and “8″ (for eight reales).
One renowned mathematics historian, Florian Cajori, theorizes that the fact that all three of the names used for the Spanish dollar began with the letter ‘p’ (peso, piastre, and “pieces of eight”), and that the plural form of each was often abbreviated as ‘ps‘ eventually led to the ‘$’. Eventually colonists combined the ‘p’ and the ’s’ into one symbol in order to write them more easily. In formal script, the simplest merge of the letters involved dropping the curve of the ‘p’ and leaving a vertical line through the ’s’, which eventually evolved into the form we have today.
Just food for thought the next time you write or see a ‘$’ somewhere.(Hopefully not on a payment bill!)
