What part of speech is a dollar sign?

Just what the title says. A student just asked me this, and damned if I know.

$=?

I’ll let one of our resident linguists (Johanna?) answer your question, but first you should know that the “parts of speech” that we were taught in grade school is just one of many ways of classifying human-produced utterances and written symbols.

Wait a minute. Why isn’t it just a symbol? We have tons of symbols that we use in written language that are not considered parts of speech. We don’t consider a question mark a part of speech. Or a decimal point. It is a symbol that allows us to interpret some other material. Even if you consider a question mark as a type of punctuation, it’s not a part of speech.

It’s a symbol. The word it stands for, “dollars”, is a noun.

“I owe him $10” = “I owe him ten dollars”. Pronoun subject, transitive verb, pronoun indirect object, direct object phrase consisting of adjective “ten” and noun “dollars”.

That was easy.

In the sentence, "The book costs 25," the reader would say, "The book costs twenty-five dollars." In this case, the symbol represents the word “dollars” and would be a noun.

Simulpost :smack:

Carly says “Thank you!” :smiley:

Its interesting that we know that it is 10 dollars and not Dollars ten.

Conversely, it is interesting that we write it 10 and not 10.

Okay, now I’m curious about this. Does the “$” have a name?
Being Dopers, we know that the “and sign” (the “&”) has an official name - the ampersand. Does the ‘dollar sign’ have a special name?

In French, it’s written 10 $.

lets not forget the octothorpe. its not a pound or hash sign.

#

Sure it is. “Octothorpe” is a fairly recent neologism, having been coined in the 60s by some telephone employee. The symbol itself has a much, much longer history of being known as a hash or pound sign.

According to this typography book on my desk, “The Elements of Typographic Style,” it’s just “dollar sign.” And this book has all manner of obscure facts about various symbols (current favorite: the pilcrow, or paragraph mark ¶ - ooh, or maybe the per mille ‰).

I still say if you’re talking about the sign, it’s just a symbol. If you say “ten dollars”, ‘dollars’ is of course a noun. But the dollar sign isn’t a part of speech at all.