Rand

How to spell rand

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rand

What does rand mean?

1. nounThe basic unit of money of South Africa, divided into 100 cents.

Rand in a sentence

• The hotel quoted the room rate in rand rather than dollars.

• A weaker rand made the safari noticeably cheaper for foreign tourists.

Where does rand come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The currency name comes from Afrikaans, where rand literally means 'edge', 'rim', or 'ridge', a word shared with Dutch and ultimately with the same Germanic root that gives English the now rare word 'rand' for the border of a shield. South Africa adopted the rand as its decimal currency in 1961, naming it after the Witwatersrand, the gold-bearing ridge near Johannesburg whose name translates as 'ridge of white waters'. So the modern money is named for a physical feature of the landscape: the long rocky outcrop where the great gold reefs were discovered in the 1880s. The same Germanic 'edge' sense also survives in shoemaking, where a rand is the narrow strip of leather set between the upper and the sole. Because the word is short and looks like the everyday name 'Rand' or the verb 'ran', writers sometimes second-guess it, but the spelling is simply r-a-n-d.

How the word is built

• rand (Afrikaans/Dutch: edge, ridge), shortened from Witwatersrand 'ridge of white waters'