Word of the Week – Coin

After talking for the last few weeks about words that were coined by writers, I thought it would be fun to actually look up the word coin! I was most interested in the verb, but alas. The word begins with the noun form, so that’s where we’ll start too.

Coin as an English word is from the early 1300s and, interestingly, meant “a wedge; a wedge-shaped piece used for some purpose” directly from the Latin cuneus, which means “wedge.” Go ahead, scratch your head. We’re used to seeing circular coins–even Ancient Roman coins were more or less circular–so this is an understandable response. But in fact, for a span of history, though coins began as circular, they ended up as wedges…when those larger circles of silver or gold were cut like a pie into smaller pieces. Spanish pieces of eight is a prime example–they were literally a large silver coin that had been cut into eights. So in that era, “wedge” was the most common coin shape, at least for smaller denominations cut from larger ones. What’s more, many dies used for stamping metal were also wedge-shaped. So lots of wedges associated here!

Throughout the 14th century the word evolved from “wedge” to “thing used to stamp metal” to “metal stamped for use as currency.”

Which is where we begin to see coin be used as a verb as well, for “to stamp metal for use as currency.” By the 1580s, the word had morphed into the metaphorical meaning of “invent, fabricate, make,” which then led to coin phrases by the 1890s and then to the singular coin a phrase by 1940.

Word Nerds Merch!