Learn the History of the Dollar Sign

While most ordinary, middle class citizens in the world might be familiar with the dollar sign of the currency of the United States of America, the likelihood that they know how the dollar sign came about is a lot less. In fact, if you ask the ordinary American citizen, he or she will probably not be able to tell you why that symbol marks one of the most powerful currencies on the planet instead of another. And not to put too fine a point on it, most foreign exchange ? currency ? dealers likely aren?t all that informed on the history of the dollar sign either.

There are actually many other countries which use the ?dollar? sign for their own currencies. Both Australia and Canada refer to their currencies in dollars (specific to their own countries, of course), and there are several South American countries which use the dollar sign for their currency even though they do not refer to the currency itself as any sort of dollar. This is not answering the question of how the dollar sign got to be what it is, but then it is easy to avoid answering a question to which there is no definitive answer.

You can go on the web to sites such as wikipedia to check out what the best options are for finding the true meaning behind the U.S. dollar sign. Whether you accept the more recent explanations that the $ developed from Spanish conquerors of North America, or that the first $ sign appeared in Scotland, or that the Founding Fathers looked to the financial symbols of ancient Rome as a guide, the time spent on research may be interesting in itself.

                                 

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