Dollar, the name of various coins and paper money formerly or currently in use in parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the western hemisphere. It is the standard value, or unit of account, in the monetary systems of Canada and the United States. The word dollar comes from the old German Daler or Taler, an abbreviation of joachimsthaler, the name of a silver coin, imprinted with an effigy of St. Joachim, which was first struck (1519) in what is now Germany. Later, a large milled-edged silver coin called peso duro (hard dollar as it is known in English) was minted in Spain and widely used in the Spanish and English colonies of the New World.After the American Revolution, the Continental Congress adopted the decimal system of coinage. The first dollars minted in the U.S. were issued by the federal government in Philadelphia in 1794, following passage of the Coinage Act of 1792. The act provided for two standards of value: a silver dollar containing 371.25 gr of pure silver and a gold dollar containing 24.75 gr of pure gold. The gold dollar, a very small coin, was minted only from 1849 to 1889. Over the years revisions in the coinage law have changed the silver and gold content in the dollar.A congressional enactment in 1900 established the gold dollar as the monetary standard of value in the U.S., thereby fixing the value of legal-tender paper money in terms of the metallic gold dollar. Before 1934, paper currency was backed by full-weight gold (or silver) coins; that is, it could be redeemed for metallic money containing gold or silver. Following the passage of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the gold content of the dollar was reduced to 13.71 gr; all gold coins and paper-money gold certificates except those in the hands of coin dealers and private collectors were called in by the federal government and exchanged for other forms of the national currency of equal face value; and the coining of gold pieces was officially discontinued. At that...
