The Dollar Sign: One or Two?

December 2, 2010 • 4:46 pm • POSTED BY Susan Murphy

I don’t know about you, but I have had no problem parting with my dollars here (as sensationally demonstrated on Black Friday, but that’s another story). As an Irish design student living in the States I’ve often wondered why the dollar sign has on occasion one, or sometimes two, lines through the S.

After asking people over here – the majority in the design field – I discovered not a lot of people knew or noticed that the dollar sign differed in some cases. Who knew this infamous symbol could be so.. infamous?

After looking into this icon I discovered it was quite an interesting story. Ayn Rand wrote in her novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ that the letters U and S superimposed created the double stroke dollar sign. I can make that out that if I squint my eyes, so, is the dollar sign a monogram?

Another theory is the dollar symbol originates from the figure 8, representing the Spanish ‘piece of eight’. Hmmm….

The Oxford Dictionary (“the world’s must trusted dictionary” no less) states that it is actually derived from the handwritten ‘ps’, an abbrevition for ‘peso’ in old Spanish-American books. The $ symbol first occurs in the 1770s, in manuscript documents of English-Americans who had business dealings with Spanish-Americans, and it starts to appear in print after 1800.

Whatever you choose to believe is completely up to you, but maybe you’ll keep it in mind next time you’re $pending.