Tintin Forums

Well, anyway, in common transactions those terms are not used.
That's interesting about the three-cent note, though. Of course, that was in 1863, when money had a lot more value. That might have even been equivalent to a modern "eagle".

Yes, sorry, my esteemed colleague - I was pulling your leg!
I quite understand that you are perfectly correct, and that, to all intents and purposes, dollars and cents are the day-to-day units of U.S. currency! Of course, you do have the dime - a unit of one tenth of a dollar; interestingly, although the coin is clearly marked “one dime”, the measurement seems to get lost as you go beyond that. Something is “thirty cents”, rather than “three dimes”. “Three dimes” would mean you had three coins of one dime each, but it would be worth thirty cents.

That does remind me, though, that we do, of course, have individual names for the coins. Pennies (1 cent), Nickels (5 cents), and (since you already mentioned the dime) quarters (25 cents). It seems that with all coin-names, except for nickels and pennies, you can find out what part of the dollar they are.

Don't forget the 'bit' or rather two bits, which is 25 cents.

Now that's one you never hear anymore (except of course in "Shave and a Haircut" which the article mentions)

I think you'd have to be pretty on the ball to know that "dime" meant "a tenth" (from the Anglo-French disme, pronounced "deem", from Latin decima), but I suppose that that isn't impossible...!
Interestingly to me, the "modern" decimal currency in Britain is entirely without new nick-names for the coinage. A pound is still a quid, but that is the amout, not the pound coin itself (you could give someone a quid in ten-pence pieces, for example).


That's a good one, and virtually impenetrable as a name, until you think of pirates...!
Pirates, at least in story-books, are reputed to be interested mainly in "pieces of eight", the old Spanish dollar, worth eight reales. If you cut a Spanish dollar into eight pieces (see where this is going...?), you had eight "bits" - so a quarter of a dollar was two reales, or "two bits", a name which stuck when America adopted its own dollar coinage.
The single "bit" dropped out of usage in America as there was no coin worth an eighth of a dollar, or 12.5 cents (and why would there be - it was a decimal system, wasn't it? Well see below...); however, it hung around for a while in the term "short bit" (or ten cents) and "long bit", which was 15 cents.
Eventually even these disappeared, but "two bits" hangs around on the fringes, and pops up from time to say hello.

So eighths of U.S. dollars went out with the abandoning of the Colonial Spanish dollar, and the introduction of decimal currency? Well, not quite...
For some arcane reason which escapes me, the New York Stock Exchange kept on using eighths of dollars to list stock prices for a few years more... right up until 1997, as it happens, at which point they went mad, and started using 16ths of a dollar (crazy, or what?)... Then they came to their senses, and have been decimal since 2001.

On the subject of coin names, in the U.K. there was a joke that circulated during the "reign" of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister, that the pound coin should be called a "Maggie", because it was "hard and brassy and thought it was a sovereign" (a play on the idea that Mrs. Thatcher's slightly imperious manner made her unapproachable and gave her an unwarranted regal air, making her like a queen, and that the new coin was designed to resemble an old gold sovereign coin).

Well, it just so happens that I did know the ultimately Latin root for "dime." it can also be seen in "December" (which was the tenth month in the Roman calendar, not the twelfth) and of course, there was the Roman form of disciplining troops, when they ordered every tenth man killed, which is still called decimation. Those Latin roots can be seen in many places.

I wouldn’t expect anything less!
However, I’m not sure that the “man in the street” could see that “dime” and “decima” were related!

Well, you see, I'm homeschooled, and my Mother has made sure from when I was very young that I learn the origins of our language, particularly the Latin and Greek roots.