50 Fun Facts About Numismatics and Coin Collecting

According to legend, the daughter of a San Francisco Mint chief spent a rare 1894 dime on which treat?

Ice cream is the legend's punchline: only 24 of the dimes were struck, nine are known to survive, and one sold for $1.9 million in 2007.

A Suffolk farmer's search for which lost tool in 1992 turned up the Hoxne Hoard of nearly 15,000 Roman coins?

A hammer went missing in a field, and the friend who brought a metal detector to find it uncovered Britain's largest hoard of late Roman gold and silver. The tool went to the British Museum too.

A 100-kilogram Canadian gold coin called the Big Maple Leaf was stolen in 2017 from a museum in which city?

Berlin's Bode Museum lost the coin in a night raid, and investigators who found gold dust on the thieves' clothes believe it was melted down. Its face value was a million Canadian dollars.

On which Pacific island group were giant limestone discs called rai, some too heavy to move, used as money?

Yap islanders tracked each stone's owner by oral history, so a disc could change hands without moving an inch. The largest is 3.6 metres across and weighs four tonnes.

The US Mercury dime of 1916 actually shows which figure, whose winged cap got her mistaken for a Roman god?

Liberty wears a winged cap on the coin to stand for freedom of thought, but the public saw the messenger god and the wrong name stuck for good.

What animal name do numismatists give a coin struck from two dies never meant to be paired?

Mule coins borrow the name of the horse-donkey hybrid because their two sides come from different parents. A famous US error of 2000 pairs a state quarter's front with a dollar's back.

Fraudsters plated the 1883 US nickel, which lacked the word CENTS, and passed it off as which coin?

The $5 gold piece was almost the same width as the new nickel, which showed only a Roman numeral for its value. The Mint hurriedly redesigned the back to add the missing word.

Which country's copper plate money, in pieces weighing nearly 20 kilograms, led to Europe's first paper money?

Sweden valued its coins by the copper in them, so its largest piece, worth 10 daler, was a sheet nobody could pocket. A Stockholm bank began printing paper notes in 1661.

Which animal appears on the one-tonne gold coin, some 80 centimetres wide, that the Perth Mint made in 2011?

A kangaroo bounds across the coin, which took the title of world's biggest gold coin from Canada. It is legal tender with a face value of one million Australian dollars.

Which assassin of Julius Caesar issued a coin showing two daggers and a cap to mark the Ides of March?

Brutus put his own portrait on the front and the letters EID MAR beneath the daggers. A rare gold example sold in London for £3.24 million in 2020.

Which animal features on China's gold bullion coins, with a fresh design almost every year since 1982?

Panda designs were frozen in 2001, but collectors objected so strongly that the mint went back to changing the artwork every year.

Which bird appears on the silver tetradrachms of ancient Athens?

Owl coins kept almost the same design for two centuries, which made them trusted trade money across the Mediterranean. Athenians simply called them little owls.

Which figure on horseback, modelled on a London hotel waiter, has graced Britain's gold sovereign since 1817?

Saint George and the dragon were engraved by Benedetto Pistrucci, an Italian newly arrived in London. His initials appear on the coin beside the year.

On which day before Easter does the British monarch hand specially minted silver coins to elderly churchgoers?

Maundy Thursday's gift comes in a white purse holding as many pence as the monarch is years old. The custom grew out of medieval kings washing the feet of the poor.

Which British coin, nicknamed a bob, was worth twelve old pence before decimal coins arrived in 1971?

Shilling coins outlived the old system by nearly twenty years, passing as five new pence in British pockets until the end of 1990.

Which small bird replaced Britannia on the back of the British farthing in 1937?

Wren designs suited the least valuable British coin, since the bird is one of the country's smallest. The farthing stopped being legal tender at the start of 1961.

Which flower, the badge of Florence, was stamped on the gold florin first struck there in 1252?

Lily badges and a standing John the Baptist stayed on the coin for nearly three centuries with barely a change. Hungary's forint takes its name from the florin.

In ancient Greek custom, a coin placed in the mouth of the dead was payment for which mythological figure?

Charon's fee was an obol, a small coin, and archaeologists have found that real burials did include coins, though not always one and not always in the mouth.

Souvenir pressed pennies were first rolled in the United States at an 1893 world's fair held in which city?

Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition sold the first American elongated coins, flattened and embossed with a new design as keepsakes of the fair.

What name is given to coins struck more than once with polished dies to give collectors a mirror-like finish?

Proof coins began as test pieces for checking that new dies were right, which is where the name comes from. Mints later struck them in quantity to sell to collectors.

Which term names the fine grooves on the edge of a coin, added to gold and silver pieces to expose clipping?

Reeding made it plain when a thief had shaved slivers of precious metal from the rim, and it survives on base-metal coins such as US dimes and quarters.

On US paper money, which symbol at the end of a serial number marks a replacement for a misprinted note?

A star stands in because no two notes in a series may share a serial number, so a spoiled note cannot simply be reprinted. Collectors pay extra for scarce runs.

Bullion coins are weighed in which unit of 31.1 grams, thought to be named after a French fair town?

Troy ounce weights are about a tenth heavier than the kitchen kind, so an ounce of gold really does outweigh an ounce of feathers. The town is Troyes in Champagne.

Which colour gives collectors their nickname for the Guide Book of United States Coins, begun in 1946?

Red covers have wrapped the price guide since its first edition, and the nickname became an official trademark. A sister handbook of dealer buying prices is named after a different cover.

What do collectors call the sealed plastic holder in which a grading company returns a certified coin?

Slab holders are sealed against tampering, and grading firms added holograms to them in 1989 to defeat counterfeiters.

What do collectors call the rainbow-hued colour change that silver coins develop by reacting with sulfur?

Toning is really a thin layer of tarnish, yet unusual colours and patterns can make a coin more desirable to collectors rather than less.

Which term, coined in 1960, covers collecting medals, badges and wooden nickels rather than money itself?

Exonumia joins the Greek for outside to the Latin for coin, so it literally means things outside coinage. Webster's dictionary accepted the word within five years.

Notaphily, a word coined in 1970 by a man at the stamp firm Stanley Gibbons, is the collecting of what?

Banknotes had been gathered seriously since the 1940s, but the hobby only split from coin collecting once it had a name of its own.

What do collectors call the scarcest issue in a coin series, such as the 1909-S VDB among Lincoln cents?

Key date coins usually had low mintages: only 484,000 of the 1909-S VDB were struck, so one coin can cost more than the rest of an album put together.

William Sheldon, creator of the 70-point coin grading scale, classified human body types in which profession?

Psychologist Sheldon built the scale in the 1940s for early American large cents, and the American Numismatic Association later based its grading standards on it.

Which Italian poet of the 1300s is credited as the first great Renaissance coin collector?

Petrarch gave the pursuit its prestige, and it soon grew so costly that Renaissance Europe knew coin collecting as the Hobby of Kings.

Which Roman emperor, by Suetonius's account, handed out old and foreign coins as festival gifts to friends?

Augustus gave the gifts some two thousand years ago, which is why coin collecting is often traced back to ancient Rome rather than to the Renaissance.

The English word for which occupation derives from solidus, a Roman gold coin introduced in the 300s?

Soldier comes from the coin because troops were paid in solidi, and the same root gave French the sou. The solidus held its weight for some seven centuries.

Silver coins of Alexander the Great show which hero, a claimed ancestor, wearing a lion-skin headdress?

Heracles was claimed as forefather by Macedon's royal house, so his head was a traditional design on Macedonian coins well before Alexander.

Which Roman god appears on the Republic's bronze as, opposite a ship's prow?

Janus shows his two faces on the coin, and Romans calling a coin toss asked for ship or head, after the galley on the other side.

Which German word names the emergency money that towns and firms issued during World War I and after?

Notgeld came on paper but also on leather, silk, linen, wood, coal and porcelain, and some was being issued even before Germany entered the war.

What do collectors call the Chinese characters that merchants punched into silver coins to vouch for the metal?

Chopmarks confirmed a coin's weight and silver content, and the earliest known examples are on bronze coins of the Ming dynasty.

What name was given to the small disc punched from Spanish coins to make Australia's holey dollar of 1813?

Dump coins were restamped with a crown and valued at fifteen pence, and a convicted forger did the cutting so the money would be useless outside the colony.

Which financier, nicknamed the king of coins, finished the only complete collection of regular US coins in 1950?

Louis Eliasberg began in the 1920s and bought his last missing piece, an 1873 dime, to own every year and mint mark then known to collectors.

Which antelope leaps across the back of South Africa's Krugerrand gold coin?

Springbok antelope appear mid-leap on the back while Paul Kruger fills the front. By 1980 the coin held more than 90% of the world gold coin market.

Which US president, who thought American coins hideous, recruited the sculptor Saint-Gaudens to redesign them?

Theodore Roosevelt was a personal friend of the sculptor, and their twenty-dollar gold piece of 1907 is considered by many to be the most beautiful US coin.

Which US gold coin dated 1933, nearly all melted before release, fetched $18.9 million at auction in 2021?

Double eagle coins of that year were ordered melted before any was officially issued, yet a few slipped out, one into the collection of Egypt's King Farouk.

What name do collectors give the first US silver dollar of 1794, an example of which sold for $10 million in 2013?

Flowing Hair dollars were sized to match the Spanish dollar Americans already used, and the 2013 price was then the highest ever paid for a coin.

Which British ceremony, first held in the 12th century, tests new Royal Mint coins for size and purity?

Trial of the Pyx takes its name from the boxes that hold the sample coins, and the head of the Mint is in effect the defendant before a High Court judge.

The American Numismatic Association, chartered by Congress in 1912, has its headquarters and museum in which city?

Colorado Springs houses the association's library and money museum. The group was founded in 1891 by a collector from Monroe, Michigan, who wanted a national body for the hobby.

Which steamer, nicknamed the Ship of Gold, sank in an 1857 hurricane carrying tonnes of California gold?

SS Central America went down off the Carolinas, and the loss of its cargo fed a financial panic. A robot submarine reached the wreck and its coins and ingots in 1988.

What term describes an error coin with its normal design on one side and a sunken mirror image on the other?

Brockage errors happen when a struck coin sticks to the die and stamps itself into the next blank, leaving that blank with a reversed copy of the design.

What surname do collectors give Britain's private small-change tokens of the 1790s, after an early cataloguer?

Conder tokens filled a shortage of small change during the Industrial Revolution, and people began collecting them soon after they were first made.

Which African country's hyperinflation produced a 100-trillion-dollar bill that could not cover a simple bus fare?

Zimbabwe stopped printing its own currency in April 2009 and let people pay in foreign money instead.

Which Austrian empress's silver trade coin has been stamped 1780, the last year of a forty-year reign, ever since?

Maria Theresa's thaler won such trust in Arabia and Ethiopia that mints kept striking it for trade long after her death, always with the same year.