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Everybody knows the symbol for the almighty dollar. But no one knows exactly where it came from. 

Our best guess for the origin of “$” is that it’s a relic of the Spanish colonial peso, or the Spanish dollar. These large silver coins were widely used across the Americas in the 18th century, long before the US created its own dollar currency.

Early Americans had used a shorthanded “Ps” to represent the Spanish peso in text. Those two letters would merge, placing the “P” on top of the “s,” eventually morphing into something that resembles the modern-day dollar…

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