The Dollar Sign ($) — History, Meaning & Every Currency That Uses It
The dollar sign ($) is one of the most recognized symbols in the world — and one of the most ambiguous, since more than 20 currencies use it. This page explains where it came from and which currencies you’re actually looking at.
Where the dollar sign comes from
The most widely accepted theory traces the $ symbol to the Spanish colonial peso, officially the peso de ocho reales or “piece of eight.” The abbreviation for pesos in colonial ledgers was “Ps,” and over time handwriters began overlapping the P and the S, eventually dropping the curve of the P to leave two vertical strokes through an S — the $ we know today.
The Spanish dollar was the dominant trade currency of the Americas through the 18th and early 19th centuries. When newly independent nations in North and South America created their own currencies, many modeled them on the familiar Spanish dollar and inherited its symbol. The United States adopted the dollar as its currency in 1792; Canada, Australia, and dozens of other countries followed at various points over the next two centuries.
A single-bar variant ($) and double-bar variant (both written as $) appear in different typefaces and style guides. The Unicode standard encodes only one dollar sign: U+0024.
Every currency that uses the $ symbol
The table below lists every active currency that officially or commonly displays the $ symbol, together with its ISO 4217 code — the unambiguous identifier you should use in any application or API call.
| ISO Code | Currency | Symbol | Country / Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| USD | United States Dollar | $ | United States |
| CAD | Canadian Dollar | $ | Canada |
| AUD | Australian Dollar | $ | Australia |
| NZD | New Zealand Dollar | $ | New Zealand |
| HKD | Hong Kong Dollar | $ | Hong Kong |
| SGD | Singapore Dollar | $ | Singapore |
| TWD | New Taiwan Dollar | $ | Taiwan |
| MXN | Mexican Peso | $ | Mexico |
| CLP | Chilean Peso | $ | Chile |
| COP | Colombian Peso | $ | Colombia |
| ARS | Argentine Peso | $ | Argentina |
| DOP | Dominican Peso | $ | Dominican Republic |
| CUP | Cuban Peso | $ | Cuba |
| UYU | Uruguayan Peso | $ | Uruguay |
| BSD | Bahamian Dollar | $ | Bahamas |
| BBD | Barbadian Dollar | $ | Barbados |
| BZD | Belize Dollar | $ | Belize |
| GYD | Guyanese Dollar | $ | Guyana |
| JMD | Jamaican Dollar | $ | Jamaica |
| TTD | Trinidad and Tobago Dollar | $ | Trinidad and Tobago |
| SRD | Surinamese Dollar | $ | Suriname |
| XCD | East Caribbean Dollar | $ | Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent |
| FJD | Fijian Dollar | $ | Fiji |
| SBD | Solomon Islands Dollar | $ | Solomon Islands |
| NAD | Namibian Dollar | $ | Namibia |
| LRD | Liberian Dollar | $ | Liberia |
How to tell dollar currencies apart
Always use the three-letter ISO code (USD, CAD, AUD) in any application handling money — the $ symbol alone is not sufficient to identify which currency is meant. This is precisely why APIs like CurrencyFreaks use ISO codes as the primary identifier.
curl 'https://api.currencyfreaks.com/v2.0/rates/latest?apikey=YOUR_API_KEY&base=USD&symbols=CAD,AUD,NZD,HKD,SGD'
