If you are one of Inspiration Line subscribers, you'll be surprise to amass lots of wonderful, entertaining, educational and informative materials that you might not have come across. As I am a coin collector, I thought this particular Fascinating Fact about coins would add a pinch of wisdom worth sharing here in my blog.
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, and was thusly named because early coins resembled the wedges that the dies used to create coins. The word cent, from the Latin centum, meaning one hundred; the term 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 love of which is the root of all evil, which translates from the Latin word mona, meaning "to warn"! 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, and 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 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.
On to a more weighty manner in which people named coins, that being physical weight. 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. Many countries used their word for crown, for example, crown, sovereign, krone, krun, krone, corona, to demonstrate that some crown authority initially granted permission to mint them. Other countries named coins in honor of their heroes, such as the Panamanian balboa, after the explorer Balboa; the Venezuelan bolivar, after one of it's national heroes Simon Bolivar, and the Peruvian sol, the Spanish word for sun, after this ancient Incan object of worship.
