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.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
