I know that the origin of the British pound sign (£) is derived from the Latin Lucre (to gain riches) and that the bar through the original ‘L’ used to denote a pound was added to avoid confusion with an uppercase letter ‘L’
What I would like to know is what is the origin of the dollar sign.
I do seem to recall that years ago somebody said it came about because early American settlers used looted, stolen, nicked, whatever Spanish pieces of eight gold coins as currency and that the sign for a piece of eight was the number 8 with a lower case ‘p’ superimposed on it.
Anyone got a better explanation?