Dollar
nounThe basic unit of money used in the United States, Canada, Australia and several other countries, divided into one hundred cents.
How to spell dollar
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce dollar
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does dollar mean?
- nounThe basic unit of money used in the United States, Canada, Australia and several other countries, divided into one hundred cents.
Dollar in a sentence
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The museum charges one dollar for entry on Sunday.
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Each ticket at the fair costs one dollar plus a small booking fee.
Where does dollar come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word traces back to the German Thaler, a silver coin first minted in the 1500s and named after Joachimsthal (Joachim's Valley), a town in Bohemia where the silver was mined; the full name was Joachimsthaler, soon shortened to thaler, meaning simply 'of the valley'. The form passed into Low German and Dutch as daler or daalder, and English speakers picked it up in the late 1500s as 'dollar'. For a long time it referred loosely to various large European silver coins, especially the widely circulated Spanish peso, the so-called 'pieces of eight'. When the young United States chose a name for its new currency in 1785, it adopted 'dollar' precisely because the Spanish dollar was already familiar in the colonies. The doubled 'l' and the unstressed second syllable ending in '-ar' rather than '-er' are the spelling points worth holding in mind.
How the word is built
- dollar (from German Thaler, short for Joachimsthaler, a coin minted in Joachimsthal)
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