Definition: What Are "Old Coins""

According to my son, at my age, nothing this side of ancient Rome is old.

Really hard question to answer and everyone will have a different answer.

My opinion and mine only - It can range.

From coins which are no longer used, but you can remember them being used in the past down to coins made before say a certain year.

My opinion would be an old coin is one made before we changed over to decimal currency in 1967 or when the last silver circulation coins were made here in 1946.

My demarcation would also include a 3rd term - "Obselete coins"

Overall

Modern coins - The current series we have, which include $1 and $2 going back to 1990 and the 2006 - now cents coins

Recent but obselete coins - The Decimal coins used between 1967 and 2006 including the 1c and 2c issued from 1967 to 1988 and the large commem dollars of the 1967 - 1989 period.

Obselete coins - 1947/67 Predecimal coins of New Zealand

Old coins - Silver coins of NZ and any British coin used here issued say from the time of Queen Victoria's silver jubilee onwards.

Really old coins - Anything issued from say 1600 to 1887.

Medieval coins (*** Edited by Staff | The bad word filter is in place for a reason. Bypassing the filter and making the intended word obvious anyway is completely unacceptable. ***) 500AD to 1600AD

Ancient coins (Seriously dude, this is CRAZY old) anything before 500AD and related to an ancient civilisation like Rome, Greece, Celts, Carthage, Persia, Israel, China before the T'ang era etc.

I am 44 years young tomorrow (April 30) and nothing made in 1976 or later, will never be considered old in my book!

Doesn't hurt, John1. "Antique" also has the legal definition in the US as
over 100 years old. Gee, that means the 1909-S VDB cent, 1916-D Mercury dime,
1916 Standing Liberty quarter and 1916 Walker half are all antiques!
I remember well those designs in circulation.

In England under the Portable Antiquities Scheme "old" is anything over 300 years. Queen Anne and back would be old while Georgian items hold far less interest, in part because we have written records and newspapers that explain the goings on in those more recent times. Back before that it is the physical evidence left behind that may be the best means of knowing what went on so long ago.

When I was a kid, "old" was IHCs, Liberty nickels, the Barber series, and anything earlier (@grapecollects' definition).

Now my collection is pretty well populated with world coins back to 1500, so to me "old" is over 520 years old, or roughly, so old that coins mostly did not yet bear a date.

And I will wait to hear from some of our ancient collectors (I mean ... collectors of ancients )

If I can remember seeing a guy on TV before he is commemorated on a coin ..., DEFINITELY NOT OLD.

All relative, indeed. I can relate to when I acquired my first French coin, an 1812 Napoleon. That was old in my view then, but "modern" according to French terminology - anything after 1795, when the franc was introduced, is "modern" in French numismatics. That is also in line with what the French mean when talking about the "old regime". That is not the former President or government, nor the post WW2 President de Gaulle, not even France under Napoleon - no, the "old regime" is the kingdom overthrown by the French revolution 1789!

Then there is the revaluation of the franc in 1960, when 100 "old" francs became 1 "new franc" (the prefix "new" being dropped after a few years), thus creating a demarcation line between old and new money.

So old French coins can be anything older than 1960 or older than 1795 (not that that is called old, but "royal").

@Princetane, congratulations on your birthday, and thank you for clarifying the Anglo-Saxon terminology when it comes to numismatic time periods. I can see that my interest lies mostly in the lower half of Really old coins, and all of Really f@#$%n old and Crazy old coins. (These are new terms to me - we have a slightly more traditional terminology here in the Germanic-Nordic region - but I will try to use them when on this forum .)