Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
Every day, billions of people exchange pieces of paper, metal coins, and increasingly, numbers on a screen.
The names attached to that money often have histories stretching back centuries, with origins in weights of silver, royal crowns, and ancient coins.
Many of the names have similar origins, even if they are on the other side of the Earth from a country that shares a currency name with them.
Learn more about the currencies of the world and how they got their names on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Sitting behind me on a shelf as I record this is a big wad of bills that I collected on my travels. It is an impressive collection of cash, but it probably isn’t worth very much.
I estimate that if I were to convert every bill separately, it might be worth about $200 in total, but doing that would be next to impossible because there are usually minimums or limits on the amount of cash you can exchange.
Mostly, there is zero demand for most of these currencies unless you happen to be in that country.
The number of individual currencies in the world today is difficult to pin down because several countries share the same currency, several non-countries have currencies, and many currencies are pegged to other currencies.
For example, 21 countries use the Euro, Somaliland has its own currency despite not being recognized, and the Bahamas pegs its currency to the US dollar one-to-one.
The number usually given is that 163 currencies are used by UN member states, 49 of which have fixed exchange rates with other currencies. But there are others beyond that.
The Cook Islands dollar is pegged to the New Zealand dollar, but in reality, it is used only for collector coins and notes, such as a $3 bill and a triangular $2 coin. In day-to-day use, New Zealand Dollars are used in transactions, but there is technically a Cook Islands Dollar.
What I want to do for the rest of the episode is cover some of the currencies in the world, what they are called, and why they are named that. While you are probably familiar with some currencies, I’m guessing that you are also probably unfamiliar with the vast majority. I can’t cover them all, but I can get through some interesting ones.
I’ve previously done an episode on the history of the dollar and where that word came from, so I’ll leave you to that episode for the currencies of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and every other country with a dollar.
The word dollar actually stems from a silver mine in what is today the Czech Republic.
Another popular currency is the pound. Pounds are used by the United Kingdom, Egypt, Lebanon, South Sudan, and Sudan. The origin of the pound is pretty straightforward.
In Britain, sterling is the name of the currency, and a pound is a unit of sterling.
The pound originally referred to a pound by weight of silver. Pound is technically short for “pound sterling.” It derives from the Latin libra pondo, meaning roughly “a pound by weight.” This also explains why the pound’s abbreviation is £, derived from libra.
Sterling refers to high-quality English silver pennies. 240 sterling pennies made one pound.
Technically, each British territory and the Crown Colonies all have their own pounds, which I’ve also covered in a previous episode.
Likewise, the name Euro is pretty straightforward. I’m going to have a future episode on the creation of the Euro, but it was literally just named after the continent.
Japan’s currency is the yen. In Japanese, the word is ‘en,’ which means round, and refers to the shape of the coin.
Yen is just an anglicized version of the Japanese word ‘en.” The symbol for the yen is a capital letter Y with two horizontal lines through it. It was originally used in the West, but the Japanese later adopted it as well.
The yen symbol is also used by the Chinese Yuan. The word yuan has the same origin as the yen in that it is the word for round.
Similar to the British currency, the yuan is just the base unit and not the name of the currency, which is officially the Renminbi. However, most people just call it the yuan.
The South and North Korean currencies are the won. Won comes from the same Chinese character and concept as Chinese yuan and Japanese yen, meaning “round.” All three names developed from terms referring to round silver coins.
Six countries currently have a currency called the rupee: India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and the Seychelles.
Rupee comes from the Sanskrit word r?pya, meaning “wrought silver,” “formed silver,” or something fashioned from silver. The name became associated with silver coins, particularly under the Mughal-era monetary system.
The Indian rupee symbol is based on the Devanagari letter ‘ra’ and the letter R from the Latin alphabet.
The currency of Indonesia is the similar sounding Rupiah, which is nothing more than the local version of the word rupee.
The currency in Russia and Belarus is called the ruble. The word ruble comes from the Russian rubit’, meaning “to cut” or “to chop.” It likely referred originally to a piece of silver cut from a larger ingot, which was then used as money.
So the name essentially means something like “a cut-off piece” of silver.
There are currently eight countries that have a currency called the peso: Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Philippines, Uruguay, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. There used to be many more countries that used a peso as currency.
Peso is just the Spanish word for “weight”. The origin of the word comes from the same Latin root as the word for pound, pondo.
The symbol for the peso is the same as the dollar sign. The use of the peso symbol actually predates that of the dollar.
The currency of Brazil is the Real. In Portuguese real means “royal.” Medieval Portuguese kings issued coins by that name, and Brazil revived the old name for its present currency in 1994.
The currency it replaced was the cruzeiro. When they changed currencies, they adopted the old Portuguese currency name.
While most European countries have adopted the Euro, not all of them have. Several EU member states have retained their own currencies.
All Scandinavian countries have currencies with similar names that literally mean “crown.” Sweden and Iceland use the krona, while Denmark and Norway use the krone. The name reflects the crown as a traditional symbol of royal monetary authority.
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are all still monarchies, but Iceland is a republic that kept the name for its currency.
Likewise, the Czech currency is the koruna, and the currency of Estonia is the kroon, both of which mean crown.
Hungary’s currency is the Forint. It is derived from the medieval Florentine gold coin, the fiorino d’oro which was enormously influential across Europe.
Poland’s currency is the Z?oty. Z?oty means “golden.” The term originally referred to gold coins circulating in Poland and eventually became the formal name of the Polish monetary unit.
Romania’s and Moldova’s currency is the leu. Leu means “lion.” It comes from the Dutch leeuwendaalder, or “lion dollar,” a coin bearing a lion that circulated extensively in southeastern Europe during the 17th century.
It should be noted that all EU countries that do not currently use the Euro—Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and Hungary, but not Denmark—are obligated to adopt the Euro at some point. However, there is no timeline, so they can indefinitely postpone it if they don’t want to actually adopt it.
The Ukrainian currency is the Hryvnia. It comes from an old Slavic word connected with the neck or mane. A hryvnia was originally a neck ornament and later became the name for standardized weights of silver used as money in medieval Kyivan Rus’.
The Turkish currency is the Lira, which is also the former name of the Italian currency. It comes from the Latin word libra, meaning “pound” or “balance scale.”
Here, I should explain why the pound, peso, and lira both have similar roots.
Libra is the Latin word for the unit of weight, and pondo was Latin for to weigh, which became the Germanic word pund, which became the English word pound. The word Pound then became associated with the unit of weight.
So, after centuries of translation and adaptation, libra pondo, which meant the weight of a pound, ended up with both words meaning “pound,” which is why the symbol for the British pound is an L.
If we turn our attention to the Middle East and North Africa, we find Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Serbia, and Tunisia, which all use the Dinar as a currency. The dinar comes from the Roman denarius, one of the principal silver coins of ancient Rome.
United Arab Emirates and Morocco use the Dirham, which is derived from the ancient Greek coin, the drachma, via Arabic.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, and Iran all have a currency called the rial. As with the Brazilian currency, it means “royal”; however, it comes from Spanish. Spanish silver reales circulated widely through Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean trade, and the name was adopted into local monetary systems.
As of the recording of this episode, the Iranian Rial is the least valuable currency in the world by its base unit. In Iran’s open market, the rial has recently traded at roughly 1.9 million rials to US$1.
On a personal note, I think the notes from the countries around the Persian Gulf are the best-looking banknotes in the world.
In South and Central America, several countries have named their currencies after people. Panama’s is named after Vasco de Balboa, Venezuela’s is named after Simón Bolívar, Costa Rica’s is named after Christopher Columbus, Nicaragua’s is named after Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, and Honduras’s currency is named after Lempira, a 16th-century indigenous leader who resisted the Spanish.
In Africa, Botswana’s currency is the pula, which comes from the Setswana word that means rain.
14 countries in West and Central Africa use the CFA Franc, which originally stood for Colonies françaises d’Afrique. They kept the initials, but they no longer have the same meaning.
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Somalia still use the shilling, which got its name from an old British coin.
Zambia and Malawi use the Kwacha, which means “dawn” in local languages. The name symbolized the dawn of a new era following independence.
In Southeast Asia, Thailand used the Bhat, which was originally a Thai unit of weight for precious metals.
Malaysia uses the Ringgit, which in Malay means “jagged” or “serrated.” It referred to the milled or ridged edges of Spanish silver dollars that circulated widely in Southeast Asia.
Finally, in Vietnam, the Dong is the Currency, which is also the Vietnamese word for copper.
I know I’ve thrown a lot at you in a very short period of time, and there are still dozens and dozens of countries that I haven’t covered.
You might have noticed several trends in how countries name their currencies. This holds even for most of the currencies I didn’t mention.
Probably the most popular names come from the names of precious metals or the units used to measure them. This includes the dollar and the pound.
Next are currencies that reference a monarchy, either by calling it “royal” or by naming it after a crown.
There are then currencies named after ancient or medieval coins, and a small group that is named after significant people in history.
There are also a small number of major currencies that refer to the shape of a coin or simply to the word “coin.”
In a future episode, I’ll cover how all these currencies interact with one another in foreign currency exchanges.
You don’t need to know the names of every currency in the world. But you should be aware that there are a lot of different currencies out there, and all of them have a history.