Whats a nickel?

[Imogene]

*snicker* And that, dear, is why I am your fangirl

*hands in the air* Huzzah!
And I did that on purpose, you know.

[Rapscallion]

interesting bit of trivia... the word "Dime" comes from the french, dîme, which is "tithe" in French. Specifically, it means the ten-percent of your salary that you're supposed to give over to the church (in Catholic parlance, although i'm told that some protestant sects use it as well). The word was shortened from "dixième", meaning "one-tenth"

Fascinating!

I'd heard that the word 'dollar' comes from the old Germanic denomination of 'thaler'. Anyone able to confirm this? I'm too lazy to google for it.

Rapscallion

[Mark Healey]

Man, I deal with a lot of tourists, and I'm tired of people complaining about our money. I know the ten-penny piece is smaller than the penny, but who cares. It used to be made of silver, which is worth more than copper. I know the money is all the same color, but green's a pretty nice color. I know all the fancy engraving makes the numbers hard to read, but it looks prettier that way.

I don't blame them. I blame the U.S. govt. Back in the day a dollar was defined as 1/20 oz of gold or 1 oz of silver (their value didn't move relative to each other then), and the coins reflected this in their size and material. BTW this is why U.S. and Canadian coins look so much alike. Then Roosevelt devalued the dollar and finally it became just some arbitrary token.

Once they ruined the money they should have changed the coins so that there was a linear relationship in size and value.

The least they could do now is put numerals on them.

When I'm king it will be fixed.

[Bacter]

Fascinating!

I'd heard that the word 'dollar' comes from the old Germanic denomination of 'thaler'. Anyone able to confirm this? I'm too lazy to google for it.

done and done

http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/dollar.html

[XCashier]

Confusing things about American money:
* The only way to tell the notes apart is to read them or recognise the presidential faces.

Well, we are trying to rectify that. http://www.secretservice.gov/money_d...ures2004.shtml

Some folks don't like these new notes, but I do, I think they're pretty!

I can understand the point about putting "ten cents" instead of "one dime" on the back of the dime, but then I also wish they'd replace the dollar note with the dollar coin, so what do I know?

[Casino Jockey]

..Snip... And curiously, we no longer use 1c and 2c coins (removed in 1991, melted down to make bronze medals for the 2000 Olympics), we've never used 25c coins (50c instead), and we have no $1 notes ($1 and $2 coins instead).

we used to have $1 and $2 notes here - i remember from when i was a kid. the $1 was replaced by a coin in 1984 and the $2 was 1988.

interestingly i did a tour of the australin mint (the one where notes are made, not the coin one.. they are made in differant places) and they mentoned that the polymer (plastic note) that was invented in australia in now printed in australia for countries like Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Kuwait, Samoa, New Zealand, Romania, Bangladesh, Solomon Islands, Mexico, Nepal, Vietnam, and Chile.

[Enjis]

Living in Michigan in the southeast area where you happen to be on the border of Windsor, I'm used to getting Canadian currency and paying in it also. .

Same here! What's more, I married a Windsorite, and we cross over to visit family and friends all the time!
I always have to have my Canadian money in a seperate wallet...or just use American bills, since they really have no problem accepting them (too bad the US dollar is not worth as much as it used to be!)

[jb17kx]

we used to have $1 and $2 notes here - i remember from when i was a kid. the $1 was replaced by a coin in 1984 and the $2 was 1988.

So we did. I missed posting that.

interestingly i did a tour of the australin mint (the one where notes are made, not the coin one.. they are made in differant places) and they mentoned that the polymer (plastic note) that was invented in australia

I didn't know you could tour NPA (Note Printing Australia). I've toured the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra, and seen some good stuff. Like coins that are shaped as a 20c and stamped as a 50c, or coins with machine parts embedded in them, all of that.

@Xcasheir. I like those notes, but I like ours better.
http://www.rba.gov.au/Museum/Display...te_series.html
And just to complete the whole OT thing, I tried out some close-up filters for my Nikon on our $10 note:

And it looks better at full size, where you can see that the background is formed from the words of a poem, with "TEN DOLLARS" repeated between each stanza.

Sorry

[Hemily]

dollars seem confusing

then again, i think ours would be to americans too...

coins:
50 øre
1 krone
5 kroner
10 kroner
20 kroner

paper:
50 kroner
100 kroner
200 kroner
500 kroner
1000 kroner

higher numbers than US money, so easy to get confused "whoa... i paid 100 bucks for a hamburger?"

10 kroner is about 1 dollar, i think i have a silver dollar laying around somwhere.

[Seshat]

I didn't know you could tour NPA (Note Printing Australia).
<snip>
And it looks better at full size, where you can see that the background is formed from the words of a poem, with "TEN DOLLARS" repeated between each stanza.

Odd fact: my husband occasionally does computer work for NPA.

The flip side of the ten has Banjo Patterson on it, and 'The Man From Snowy River' printed in teeeeeeeny type in the background. If you don't have near-perfect eyesight and good lighting it doesn't even look like text.

It's an anti-counterfeiting measure. If you're not printing the sheer number of notes the Mint does, a machine to print that clearly and that small costs enough to make accurate counterfeiting of that feature not really worth it. Yet anyone with a magnifying glass can check whether that feature exists on the note.

[It's me]

Then there is "Canadian Tire Money"! We have a chain of hardware stores here in Canada that, when you pay in cash, give you what are effectively store-credits, the amount being a percentage of the value of your purchase. The credits are in the form of small bills having values of 5¢, 10¢, all the way to $1. Physically they are about 2/3 the size of Canadian currency, and each denomination is a different colour.

At Canadian Tire stores they are used just like cash. I suspect that most Canadians have a stash of $30 or $40 worth of them squirreled away somewhere.

Tourists, of course, don't get it. Multi-coloured bills with "CANADAian Tire" printed on them...

BTW: Is there a confused/misguided tourists thread? This one seems to have been thread-jacked

[Sofar]

As much as I like our own money, (at least the old bills. The new ones don't look as good,) I must admit Australian money is pretty cool.