It all begins, logically enough (if you accept a somewhat loose definition of “logically”), in a small mountain town in northwestern Bohemia, named Jáchymov. In the beginning of the 16th century this town (located in what today is the Czech Republic) was known by its German name, Sankt Joachimsthal, which may be translated as “dale (or valley) of Joachim.” This may not seem yet like it allows a logical path to the modern dollar, but it will.

About the beginning of the 16th century the Count of Schlick (a name that comes from genuine history books, and not from a Lemony Snicket novel) opened a mine in this town, and from its ore began to mint and issue a good amount of silver coin. William Lyman Fawcett, in his Gold and Debt; an American Handbook of Finance(1879) informs us that these coins were “of uniform weight and fineness” and that “traders of the time were in want of some international standard,” and so “these coins soon became in good repute all over Europe under the names of Schlicken thalers or Joachim’s thalers.”

The second of these names, more often written as joachimstaler, appeared to have had more success than did schlicken thaler, although it did not last for a terribly long time. Soon the name of this coin became shortened to the German taler, and from there became daler. By the middle of the 16th century the English language had added daler to its vocabulary, used in reference to an increasing variety of coins from Europe and elsewhere which were being so described.

The dollar was proposed as the monetary unit of the United States in the early 1780s, and adopted formally in 1792 (although they were not actually issued as currency until 1794). Since that time our language has taken on a remarkable number of synonyms for this word for “100 cents,” often found in the form of slang.