Translingual

Symbol

$

1. The symbol for peso used everywhere except in the Philippines
2. The symbol for dollar, taken from the peso
3. Figurative. A substitute for the letter S or a space or hyphen used as a symbol of (perceived) greedy business practices

   for example: "Micro$oft Window$"

The dollar or peso sign is a symbol primarily used to indicate the various dollar and peso units of currency around the world.

Origin

The sign is attested in business correspondence between the British, Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans in the 1770s, as referring to the Spanish-Mexican peso, known as "Spanish dollar" or "pieces of eight" in British North America where it was adopted as U.S. currency in 1785, together with the term "dollar" and the $ sign.

The origin of the "$" sign has been variously accounted for. Perhaps the most widely accepted explanation is that it is the result of the evolution of the Spanish and Mexican scribal abbreviation "p" for pesos. This theory, derived from a study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century manuscripts, explains that the s gradually came to be written over the p developing a close equivalent to the "$" mark."

Alternative hypotheses

There are a number of other theories about the origin of the symbol, some with a measure of academic acceptance, others the symbolic equivalent of folk etymologies.