How did US coins get their names?

Answer 1

The main terms Dollar and Cent come respectively from German and Latin.

In the late Middle Ages some jurisdictions in central Europe began striking large silver coins using ore from deposits that tended to be found in valleys. The Germanic word for "valley" is "Tal" or "Thal" (pronounced "tahhl", although at the time its spelling wasn't consistent), so the coins became known as "Talers" which literally means "from the valley". As the coins' use spread, the pronunciation changed depending on the language of the countries that adopted them. When they reached the Netherlands the name morphed into "daler", pronounced "dahhler". The English and Dutch operated widespread trading businesses, and with interaction the English traders anglicized the spelling and pronunciation to the familiar "dollar".

When the newly-independent US adopted a 10-based coinage system, the country's classically-educated Founding Fathers looked to Latin to name the new subsidiary coins (those that are fractions of a dollar). The name "cent" was chosen for the coin that's 1/100 of a dollar, using the same Latin root that gives many words related to multiples and fractions of 100 (e.g. percent, centennial, etc.).

However the first cents were large coins that were almost the same size and color as the English 1-penny coins that had been in use while the country was a colony, so the general public kept using the term "penny" for the new 1-cent coins as well. The usage became so ingrained that even when the coin was downsized in 1856 the term "penny" stuck around, as it does today.

The "dime" denomination also came from Latin as well as French, using the Latin root for "ten" that on one hand led to words such as decade and decimal in English, and the French word "dixième" ("deez-iYEM") which means "one tenth". That name too was anglicized, first to disme ("DIZZ-muh") which proved difficult to pronounce, and shortly afterwards to the familiar "dime".

Quarters and half dollars didn't get any special nicknames in general use, but they were occasionally called "two bits" and "four bits". Those slang terms came about because the US at first allowed co-circulation of coins from the neighboring Spanish colonies at par with US dollars. The most common Spanish coin was called a "milled dollar" and didn't have any convenient smaller denominations. The coins were made of soft silver so to make change, many merchants chopped the coins in half with a heavy cutter, then split those into fourths and eighths. The eighths were called "bits", so a quarter was treated the same as two Spanish bits.

The term "nickel" has an even stranger history. While nickel metal is extremely common in coins today, it wasn't used for early coinage because its hardness quickly damaged the primitive dies and presses of the time. Low-denomination coins could only be made of copper or silver; a copper 5¢ coin would have been too large so the Mint struck tiny silver coins called half-dimes. In 1851 the Mint introduced an even smaller silver "trime", or 3¢ coin, for use in buying postage stamps which then cost 3 cents.

Half-dimes and trimes were inconvenient because they were so tiny, so the Mint looked for alternatives. By the 1860s Metallurgy had improved to the point where nickel became practical for coinage and the Mint introduced copper-nickel versions of the 3¢ and 5¢ coins. However, they still kept minting the silver versions in parallel for a number of years, which led people to distinguish the varieties by calling them "three cents, nickel", "five cents, silver", and so on.

By 1873 the new nickel coins had proved themselves well enough that their silver cousins were discontinued, but the names persisted. The nickel 3¢ piece was discontinued when postal rates changed, leaving the "five cents, nickel" as the only copper-nickel coin in circulation. The "five cents" part became redundant eventually disappeared from common use, although in some more isolated parts of the US you occasionally hear older people talk about "five cent nickels".