Some money words were minted millennia ago.
Others are more re-cent.
The Coining of “Money”
Money comes from a mint, but,
etymologically, both words come from the same source: the Latin word monēta,
meaning “mint.” That word derives from Monēta, an epithet of Juno,
queen of the Roman gods.
In ancient Rome, the temple of Juno Moneta served as a
mint for silver coins, and the association stuck—perhaps making “money” and
“mint” the only two words that were literally coined.
Bet Your Bottom Taler
To find the origins of the word “dollar,” we have
to go back to the days of the Holy Roman Empire, to the town of Joachimstal
(now Jáchymov in the present-day Czech Republic). A coin that was minted there
in the 16th century became known as a Joachimsthaler, and
then taler for short. Taler became daler In
Low German before it entered English and became “dollar.”
Bucks and Bubbles
“Bucks,” the slang term for “dollars,” is short
for “buckskin,” a reference to the use of deerskins in trade.
“Bill”—as in
“dollar bill” and the bills that cause your dollar bills to disappear—derives
from an alteration of the Latin word bulla, which meant “seal on a
document,” and, before that, “bubble.” Maybe that’s why it always feels like
your money is floating away.
Breaking the Bank
The word “bank” derives
from the Old Italian word banca, meaning “money changer’s table.”
The word “bankrupt” comes from the Italian phrase banca rota, which literally
means “broken bank.”
The Dead Pledge
If you have a mortgage on your home, congratulations:
you’ve agreed to a “dead pledge.” The word “mortgage” combines two Latin words
that mean just that: mortus, a form of morī (“to
die”), and gage (“pledge”). In Anglo-Norman law, a “dead
pledge” was a system of credit in which any profits generated by the real
estate itself were kept by the creditor. In contrast, an arrangement in which
profits from the property could be applied to the principal was called a vif
gage—a “living pledge.”