The History of the dollar sign

Just look at cartoons and popular culture. Bank robber’s sacks, Mr Krab’s eyes. Andy Warhol!

It’s synonymous and it’s everywhere, especially in the United States of course. Interesting, however, it began not as a US invention but as a handwritten abbreviation for the Spanish colonial peso or “piece of eight”.

In the late 18th-century, the Spanish silver peso was circulated widely in the Americas, and accountants were writing “Ps” (pesos) where there is a capital “P” with a superscript “s”. In their haste, these letters often joined the letters and, over time, the overlapping P and S simplified into the single-character “$”. An oft-repeated tale credits the merchant Oliver Pollock with first using this shorthand in 1778, and, indeed, his New Orleans letter in September 1778 shows a form nearly identical to “$”. However, modern thinkings agrees the symbol simply arose from Latin‑style abbreviations rather than a US monogram or coin imagery.

Excerpt from an 1778 letter by Oliver Pollock, showing a “$”‑like symbol that evolved from “Ps” for pesos. These late‑18th‑century manuscripts link the Hispanic peso to the modern dollar sign.

Around this time, the Spanish real de a ocho (8 reales) coin – the piece of eight – was the model for the US dollar. It was legal tender in Britain and America, and the US Coinage Act of 1792 defined the dollar by weight to match the Spanish dollar. Business correspondence in the 1770s shows an “$” used to mean the peso or Spanish dollar. In colonial America, this foreign silver was so trusted that early US paper notes even replicated its motifs, and it spread across the world. The Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection says that by the late 18th century the Spanish dollar was effectively the world currency, and Americans referred to it simply as the dollar.

A Spanish 8‑reales “piece of eight” (1796). These silver pesos were the template for the U.S. dollar; Congress fixed the dollar’s value to the Spanish coin’s weight in 1792.

By the end of the 18th century the “$” symbol was entering print. Philadelphia printer Archibald Binny is credited with the first known printed dollar sign in a 1797 typography specimen. The symbol then spread into ledgers and newspapers. Indeed, even in 1686 (much earlier) the British accountant John Collins printed a merchants’ guide using a dollar‑sign glyph to denote “dollars”, which at the time meant thalers or rixdollars (no, I’d not heard of them either before researching this!). Early American documents wrote “$1” similar to the British “£1” style (leading rather than following the figure) to indicate pesos or dollars. Over the 19th century, most typefounders settled on the one‑bar variant as the default dollar sign for English‑language printing, although the two‑bar form continued in usage in some places, notably Portuguese‑language countries, where it is called the cifrão.

Excerpt from John Collins’s An Introduction to Merchants’ Accounts (1686), showing a $‑like symbol used in a ledger. Early typefaces already had a glyph for “dollars” in late 17th‑century commerce.

Today most fonts still offer both forms (double and single bar) as alternate designs. Unicode treats them as stylistic variants of the same code point. As a rule, the single‑bar $ is used for US and most currencies, while the double‑bar “cifrão” appears in contexts tied to Portuguese reals or for historic effect. For example, many “old style” serif fonts – such as Baskerville – show a double‑bar $ by default, whereas simpler sans‑serif faces have one bar, which we can assume is for the sake of simplicity. Overall, the dollar sign has well evolved from a scribal ligature to a standard glyph. Its single- vs. double-stroke forms remain a matter of style and context, leaving the final decision up to you, the designer.