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Which coin is the dollar sign thought to come from?
The exact origin of the symbol is debated.
The dominant theory ties the sign to the Spanish silver peso, also called the piece of eight or 8 reales coin, which circulated widely in the Americas and was accepted by merchants long before the United States issued its own dollar. The English word 'dollar' itself descends from 'thaler', a silver coin from Bohemia, and English speakers applied it to the Spanish coin.
The most common explanation is that the symbol evolved from a handwritten abbreviation 'ps' for pesos, in which the s was written over the p, leaving an S crossed by a vertical stroke. Another popular story links the two vertical lines to the Pillars of Hercules on Spanish coins, but historians tend to view that as a later embellishment. Whether the sign has one or two strokes also varies by typeface, and both forms are used.
Spanish dollars remained legal tender in the United States until 1857, and the US adopted a dollar unit in the 1790s, which helped carry the symbol into American use. Because the sign arose in handwriting before the era of standardized records, no single inventor or first document is known with certainty, so the origin remains a well-supported theory rather than a proven fact.