"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 04/01/18 (foreign coins' names: nickel, quarters, dollar)

I have been talking about money this week and yesterday I was talking about old slang terms for British money. Today I/m going to talk about the names of some foreign coins. I'm going to start with nickel, which became very popular after about 1866 when the content of the five cent piece in North America was hanged from silver and copper to copper and nickel, whixh was a much cheaper metal. It comes from Kupfernickel which was a German name meaning "copper demon", and it was called copper demon because miners would sometimes alight auon this one and think, "Wow, we've found some copper"when in fact it was just a nickel which as I say was cheaper. It's related to "pumpernickel", as I often delight in saying, which is a bread, which mean "farting demon". Back to coin though, a quarter - originally quarters were Spanish dollars circulated alongside US dollars for many years, and they were often divided into eight wedge-shaped segments, believe it or not, and so the government eventuslly issued 25 cent coin to enable people to give change. And these coins were known as quarters or two bits, and we still talk about two-bits operation, which is kind of small change, if you like. Not the same incidentally as pieces of eight - they were the eight "real" coins, the Spanish silver dollar, and they were marked with the figure eight, hence that term. The Australian dollar - suggested nemes for that were great, the Royal, the Austral, the Oz, the boomer, the roo, the emu, the kanga, the digger and the dinkum. All slang terms for the Australian dollar. But I'll finish with dollar itself, because people often wonder about this one. That goes back to Joachimsthaler, and that was a coin that came from a silver mine of Joachimsthal in the Czech Rpublic. It then crossed over to Spanish American colonies and eventually to North America close to the War of Independence, but it's actuallu a name that comes from the Czech Republic.