Dollar sign

The dollar sign, also known as peso sign, is a currency symbol consisting of a capital "S" crossed with one or two vertical strokes ($or depending on typeface), used to indicate the unit of various currencies around the world, including most currencies denominated "peso" and "dollar". The explicitly double-barred sign is called cifrão in Portuguese. The sign is also used in several compound currency symbols, such as the Brazilian real (R$) and the United States dollar (US$): in local use, the nationality prefix is usually omitted. In countries that have other currency signs, the US dollar is often assumed and the "US" prefix omitted. The one- and two-stroke version are often considered mere stylistic (typeface) variants, although in some places and epochs one of them may have been specifically assigned, by law or custom, to a specific currency. The Unicode computer encoding standard defines a single code for both. In most English-speaking countries that use that symbol, it is placed to the left of the amount specified, e.g. "$1", read as "one dollar". The symbol appears in business correspondence in the 1770s from Spanish America, the early independent U.S., British America and Britain, referring to the Spanish American peso, also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in British America. Those coins provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792, and for the larger coins of the new Spanish American republics, such as the Mexican peso, Argentine peso, Peruvian real, and Bolivian sol coins. With the Coinage Act of 1792, the United States Congress created the U.S. dollar, defining it to have "the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current" but a variety of foreign coins were deemed to be legal tender until the Coinage Act of 1857 ended this status. The earliest U.S. dollar coins did not have any dollar symbol. The first occurrence in print is claimed to be from 1790s, by a Philadelphia printer Archibald Binny, creator of the Monticello typeface.