Talk:Solidus (coin)

"Until decimalisation in the United Kingdom, the letter s, from solidus, was used to represent a shilling, worth 1/20th of a Pound Sterling."

I don't wish to seem ignorant, but why do we think 's' comes from 'solidus' and not from 'shilling'? DJ Clayworth 18:54, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• A good question. Pre decimalisation the UK used pounds, shilings and pence, all of which were denoted by latin derived symbols: £ d and s.

£ (a decorated L) from libra, the Latin word for "pound", d for denarius, and s for solidus. I guess this dates right back to when the Roman currency was used, although the pound would presumably have referred only to the weight, since I don't think there was a roman coin of that name. 80.43.216.81 02:02, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

• • I should also have mentioned that the French used the same symbols, with the same derivation, except in their case L d and s stood for livre, sol (or, later, sou) and denier 80.43.216.81 02:12, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

• • • It seems more plausible to me that the symbols £sd were derived from livre, sou and denier rather than the Latin originals. Nik42 06:29, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• • • • Scholars of medieval history probably have a pretty good sense of what sorts of things might plausibly have occurred in the Middle Ages. The rest of us speculate at our peril. My guess is that they used those three letters because they stood for Latin words. People who didn't know Latin also didn't know how to read. Zyxwv99 (talk) 02:37, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

• • • • • All wrong, I'm afraid. It subverts the validity of this article: the 's' comes from the Roman coin Sestertius.--Po Mieczu (talk) 02:03, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

An apparently good-faith edit added the peculiar phrase "dumpy issues from the Byzantine Empire". Google search for "dumpy issues" turns up no other uses of this phrase, so I expect it is not standard. Can some numismatist perhaps figure out what was meant here and change it to something more intelligible? -- Dominus 15:39, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

I know the style guide says don't use an AD or CE unless the date without it would be ambiguous, but I feel since this is dealing with the Roman empire, which existed in both CE and BCE, that this case qualifies for ambiguous. It confused me. In the standard of WP:BOLD I edited it. Feel free to change it back if you disagree. Whiteflame74 (talk) 17:42, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Even though the word ordinarily has negative connotations in contemporary English, in this context it doesn't. A small edit, but greatly improves the article. Zyxwv99 (talk) 01:00, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Québec is the only province in Canada where Québec French is official and where cenne et trente-sous are normed by the Office de la langue française. Acadian French is official in New Brunswick but cenne et trente-sous are not in use. Eklir (talk) 15:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

This might be a very dumb question. In what aspect of solidus was "solid"? Komitsuki (talk) 15:15, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

At the end of first section, "Roman and Byzantine coinage", there's a statement tagged with "citation needed" which says that the solidus had no face value. This is essentially the same as saying that the solidus was a floating currency. Here's a relevant passage from page 239 in "The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine" (ISBN: 9780521818384, article written by Georges Depeyrot, translated and edited by Noel Lenski) which elaborates on this function of the solidus:

From the moment of its creation, the solidus constituted a standard currency and unit of value while other coins were relegated to secondary functions. Thus the mints could suspend their output of silver money and manipulate the weight of their bronze issues without destabilizing the system. The solidus quickly gained strength as an empire-wide unit of value and then retained that strength because of the choice of Constantine and his successors never to alter its characteristics. This made the solidus an excellent monetary instrument for estimating debts, so much so that it quickly became standard to reckon loans only in gold solidi. The role conferred on the gold currency from the 310s onward made it the center not only of the monetary system but also of the economy. Gold coin gained a supramonetary value. By overtaking fixed relations of exchange with the silver coin, it became a true floating currency. The fact that taxes were demanded in gold contributed, for example, to a growth in the demand for the solidus as a commodity.

I'll leave it to someone else to do the actual edit if someone would feel that the above would resolve the citation tag.

Abvgd (talk) 12:59, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

The lead is supposed to summarize the body, and shouldn't have new information there, such as "Pepin the Short's currency reform" which is not mentioned anywhere in the article (so we don't know what century that was in). The lead should be rewritten; material not contained in the body should be moved down, and the lead should be expanded to summarize the rest of the article, most of which is not touched on at all in the Lead. Mathglot (talk) 01:56, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

It seems like trough the article we mention several time that the coin kept it dimension unchanged. But at no point we say which dimension it is? Apparently the Art Institute of Chicago claims it collection vary from ~1.4cm to 2.1cm. . I don't know enough on the subject to express an opinion about any of this. I just discovered today that they should weigh 24 [Carat (mass)|carats] and that's the extent of my knowledge. Iluvalar (talk) 22:05, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

It has been proposed in this section that multiple pages be renamed and moved. A bot will list this discussion on the requested moves current discussions subpage within an hour of this tag being placed. The discussion may be closed 7 days after being opened, if consensus has been reached (see the closing instructions). Please base arguments on article title policy, and keep discussion succinct and civil. Please use {{subst:requested move}}. Do not use {{requested move/dated}} directly. Links: current log • target log • direct move

• Solidus (coin) → Solidus
• Solidus → Solidus (disambiguation)Solidus (disambiguation)

– Clear primary topic by pageviews and long-term significance, with nothing else coming close. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 06:08, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

• Support: I came into this discussion skeptical that the coin should be primary over the punctuation mark, but having reviewed the history I agree. The use of solidus for this mark derives from its use to denote shillings, which were the English equivalent of the solidus (other languages have their own equivalents, such as Austrian schillings, and French sols or sous, but I don't know that they ever equated solidus with a punctuation mark used to denote them, and this discussion necessarily depends on the use of the term in English).

Page views suggest that most people viewing the punctuation mark arrive there from sources other than the redirect from "Solidus (punctuation)", which has very few daily views, and other names for this mark seem to be more common now. Since the coin is not only the origin of the term for punctuation, but receives over 200 daily views, I think we can call it primary by both long-term significance and page views. I also think disambiguation pages benefit from having "(disambiguation)" as a disambiguator disambiguating them disambiguously. P Aculeius (talk) 12:07, 10 April 2026 (UTC)