Oftentimes, instead of seeing something written as $10, it is written as 10-.
How did the dash come to mean “dollars”?
(Two questions in a row, I’m on a roll!)
I never took it to mean dollars, but that the dash indicates no cents
It doesn’t.
It means “no cents.”
The dollar sign is implied.
Oh. I never knew that.
I don’t know how it came about or spread. However when I worked as a bank teller, this is how we were trained: if a dollar value was even, draw a line through the cents column. If a customer had carefully written in “00” in the cents column of a deposit or withdrawal slip we were to strike it through.
I guess a “0” can be mistaken for a 6 if scribbled or altered into an 8. A line doesn’t look like any number and can’t be confused for anything other than nothing.
I haven’t noticed that writing $2.00 as $2-- is common though, to tell you the truth.
It means “even” or “no cents.” It does not replace the dollar sign. (If the latter is not implied, as beowulff says, you may say both dollar sign before and dash after. That’s what I do.)
Think of the dash as a fraction bar. Some people will write an even number of dollars by ending with “00” over a dash, with an implicit “100” below. Or you can just draw the dash.
I do not know the history but yes it is normal accounting notation for no cents or 0
I’m betting it is another symbol lost to the limited number of keys on a keyboard but if you open up excel, enter a 0 and then change the formating to “accounting” you will have a $ —
note it is an em dash and not a shorter en dash -
The IRS used to want zero dollar amounts written like this: -0-. I don’t know if they still do. My dad’s a CPA and I grew up seeing -0- all over the place. It looks to me like a zero plopped into the middle of a dash, as if someone couldn’t make up their mind which glyph served the purpose better, and thought heck, why not split the difference…
My father also used to write amounts in his sales receipts with the number for the dollars, then a line with the numbers for cents above the line, about half size. But if there were no cents, then just the line, without “00” above it.
That’s right. That was exactly what I meant before. Write the cents (the numerator of a fractional dollar) above the line. A denominator of 100 is universal, and therefore optional, usually unwritten. If there are no cents (numerator of 0), then that is also optional, usually unwritten; you have just the line.
When I was younger, I often saw prices posted (in stores) or shown in newspaper ads as:
$2.[sup]oo[/sup]
I would take that as a redundancy, like “.50¢” or “$20 dollars.” There’s no reason to have a point and a line.
When the British used shillings (before decimal currency was introduced in 1967), they often expressed monetary amounts in shilling/pence form. For example, six shillings and two pence was 6/2, while just six shillings was 6/-. Could this be an influence?
Seems like only yesterday that you could get a pretty good dash for a nickel.
Am I the only one that has never seen this before this thread?
It may be an Urban Legend, but I seem to recall reading that the virgule (/) was actually originally a “long s” (like an uncrossed f) standing for solidus, the L.s.d being respectively librae, solidi, and denarii.