Dollar

On 15 January 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began minting coins from silver mined locally in Joachimsthal and marked on reverse with the Bohemian lion.

The town's name is derived from Saint Joachim, coupled with the German word Thal (Tal in modern spelling), which means 'valley' (cf.

[13] The predecessor of the Joachimsthaler was the Guldengroschen or Guldiner which was a large silver coin originally minted in Tirol in 1486 and introduced into the Duchy of Saxony in 1500.

[14] For the English North American colonists, however, the Spanish peso or "piece of eight" had always held first place, and this coin was also called the "dollar" as early as 1581.

These late 18th- and early 19th-century manuscripts show that the s gradually came to be written over the p developing a close equivalent to the "$" mark, and this new symbol was retained to refer to the American dollar as well, once this currency was adopted in 1785 by the United States.

[22][23][24][25][26] By the time of the American Revolution, the Spanish dólar gained significance because they backed paper money authorized by the individual colonies and the Continental Congress.

[16] Because Britain deliberately withheld hard currency from the American colonies, virtually all the non-token coinage in circulation was Spanish (and to a much lesser extent French and Dutch) silver, obtained via illegal but widespread commerce with the West Indies.

On 2 April 1792, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton reported to Congress the precise amount of silver found in Spanish dollar coins in common use in the states.

Various acts have subsequently been passed affecting the amount and type of metal in U.S. coins, so that today there is no legal definition of the term "dollar" to be found in U.S.

In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1891, an Englishman posing as a London beggar describes the shillings and pounds he collected as dollars.

Large numbers of these eight-real coins were captured during the Napoleonic Wars, hence their re-use by the Bank of England.

Silver dollars reaching China (whether Spanish, trade, or other) were often stamped with Chinese characters known as "chop marks", which indicated that that particular coin had been assayed by a well-known merchant and deemed genuine.

Prior to 1873, the silver dollar circulated in many parts of the world, with a value in relation to the British gold sovereign of roughly $1 = 4s 2d (21p approx).

The silver dollars of Latin America and South East Asia began to diverge from each other as well during the course of the 20th century.