Are US Coin Denominations Difficult To Determine?

I believe that this Country became great because we wanted to live free of religious persecution and the set ways of old Europe where tradition was stifling.

It seems like some are proposing erecting our own traditions and stifling ways that ignore simple problems that can be easily addressed.

This thread is about putting the number of cents or dollars that a coin is worth on a coin.

I am at a loss as to why people are so against considering or discussing this.

I would posit that America is great because we rejected the rigidity of old European institutions and came up with new, innovative forms of governance that addressed problems in an agile, inclusive and innovative ways.

When we abandon that, we have become what we came here to escape.

A lot of foreign countries use the USD as their currency such as Ecuador, El Salvador, The Virgin Islands ect. Many other countries like that accept US currency as an alternative second currency.

In the early years most of our coins did not have denominations on them. As with the British custom of the time people were expected to know the value of the coins based on their size and metal composition. Later when denominations were added they were done as numbers, possibly because most of the country had a low literacy rate. Nost people that could not read could still understand numbers. Later as the literacy rate increased denominations tended to switch from numbers to being written out. Today, while the literacy rate is still high, I do believe it is declining and more people are doing less and less reading (At least a quarter of my high school graduating class could not read at better than a third grade level.). At the same time there has been more and more of a push to change the denominations from written word back to numbers.

The idea of using numbers on the Euro coins makes sense. The coins were to be able to circulate anywhere in Euro District and that encompasses at least seven languages. If the denomination was written out, what language do you use? Some country would feel offended. And writing it out in seven languages? I don't think so.

My family never had a problem spending any type of US coinage and smaller US banknotes in Canada, Mexico, even the UK, and of course Cayman, Jamaica, Bermuda, all the Saintly islands, and these shop owners in the touristy areas are smart-- they know the exchange rates and I have been skimmed a little bit but it really doesn't bother me. A shop owner told me, "of COURSE we take dollars, Senor. We don't put the dollars in the bank. We keep the dollars and spend our peso

Halves and dollars notwithstanding, I have never met a single person who didn't know how to use our currency. It's taught multiple times in elementary school, and I could add up the value of my piggy bank when I was seven.

I have never talked to a foreigner who had to use our currency, but a five minute crash course should be able to bring any halfway intelligent adult up to speed.

Works for me.

I agree with you there, X2an. I quite often take cruise ship passengers (mostly from America or Western Europe) on day excursions from the port of Dover, and they always find these coins confusing.

It was amazing to see how quickly this thread got derailed from a question/suggestion about the way our coins are denominated into a series of haranguing posts that all but accuse OP of being anti-American or unpatriotic simply because he or she might prefer to see numerals instead of words for denominations.

We use denominations borrowed largely from European colonial coinage. Of the Half Cent, cent, nickel, Half Dime, dime, quarter, half dollar, and dollar, only the nickel can be said to be a truly American denomination in its creation.

The basis of United States coinage as fractions of 100 and 200 (and originally 1000) instead of the British 240 pence to the pound, the German 288 pfennige to the thaler, or the Spanish denominations 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4, and 8 Reales actually showed a great deal of "forward thinking" at the time -- Britain did not lose L/S/D until 1970, Germany remained on the old system until 1876, and Spain did not decimalize until the 1860s-70s at home and 1890s abroad.

I do not think that the American coinage "needs" to be changed to include a numeric denomination, but would not be opposed to such a change. At a minimum, it could resolve some discrepancies such as the size of a nickel relative to that of a cent or a dime in an era devoid of precious metals in our coins.

Britain did not lose its national identity, nor Spain, nor Germany, in the wake of changing to decimal denominations or the Euro, so the concept that the denomination of a nation's circulating coinage is somehow inextricably linked to a national self-identity is perplexing and has no basis in historical fact, given that coinage denominations have been in flux since the days of the Romans and Greeks.