Can anyone top this for earliest appearance of the word “dollar” in English?
ROSS
That now
Sweno, the Norways’ king, craves composition:
Nor would we deign him burial of his men
Till he disbursed at Saint Colme’s inch
Ten thousand dollars to our general use.
From “Macbeth”, c. 1603
LINK TO COLUMN: Where did the word “dollar” come from? - The Straight Dope
There are a few other uses of the word in Shakespeare’s plays, though I’m not sure off the top of my head which of them is oldest.
Yeah. 1553. From the OED:
.
The word “dollar” in English in nothing more than a version of the large silver coins of Germany and Scandinavian countries. Germany had thalers and Scandinavia had dalers.
T’ain’t quite the same, though. I’ll still hold out for Willy having used the earliest version as currently spelled. It’s jarring modernity so flummoxed my high school English teacher he told me with considerable certainty it had to be a later interpolation. No likely candidate for the Straight Dope advisory board he.
Can you link me to the ca. 1603 version of Macbeth that actually has the spelling of “dollar.” I’m gonna bet not. I don’t think it exists.
Here’s the problem–Can you show that Willy wrote and published that in 1603? The earliest I can find what purports to be a faithful copy of the original is in 1623, using Google Book Search.
I have no problem believing it’s a faithful copy. All we need to know is when it was written and published.
Google Books also yields some interesting rivals.
That above is a link to a book reliably published in 1603. The non-dramatic works of Thomas Dekker.
That’s a link to a 1609 book.
Spelling was such a hit or miss thing in those days, even Willy might have spelled it one way in one play, and perhaps a different way in the next.
Spelling is meaningless in that period. The idea that there is one and only one “correct” spelling for a word was yet a meme unborn. Not to mention that Shakespeare’s spelling is not necessarily the same as his compositors’.
There is every reason to believe that that particular play, as we now know it, is a later revision, probably by Thomas Middleton. But there is no reason to believe that that particular line is not by Shakespeare; it’s just a bit of plot mechanics that Middleton, who mainly worked to make the play more spectacular, wouldn’t have inserted—he would have been more likely to have cut it!
That the original play was about 1603 is pretty clear. It’s an “I, for one, welcome our new Scottish overlords” moment that made sense in 1603, not 1623. Anyway, the line’s clearly at least as old as 1623, no matter what.
Not only there. It was used in many places in Europe. The name Thaler, Taler, Daler etc. comes from a place in Bohemia called Joachimsthal were they were first minted in 1518.
The late, great Isaac Asimov referred to this in one of his science essays (on platinum); Joachimsthal is German for “the valley of St. Joachim”, and the coins were originally called joachimsthalers, but that proved to be too long and clumsy, so the name was shortened to thaler, and that (or other-language variants) came to mean any coin of similar size or value, including in the end the U.S. dollar. Another such coin was the Spanish doubloon, which had an 8 on one side, hence both “pieces of eight” and the $ sign.
One strange twist was that some counterfeiters in Joachimsthal found a deposit of what they thought to be silver, and used it to strike fake thalers; but the metal was later discovered to be platinum, making the fakes more valuable than the real thing! 
Evidence that the dollar sign comes from the numeral ‘8’?
Powers &8^]
It doesn’t. We’ve been through that enough times.
Not doubting that factoid, but would love to see a cite for the story about fakes being made of platinum.
See: What does the S in the dollar sign represent? - The Straight Dope … The Archives are our friend.
PS - harwell, I’ve added the link to Cecil’s column at the bottom of your post. For others: when you start a thread, it’s helpful to provide a link to the column under discussion. Saves search time, and keeps us on the same page (sort of.)
I see no evidence for robert@fm’s claim in that article, with which I’m quite familiar.
Powers &8^]
^ As I already said, it was Asimov’s claim, not mine.