Currency names that several countries share
This page gives no exchange rate. It deals with something else, and with something that never changes: names. More than twenty currencies are called dollar, about ten are called franc, and a price written in one of them means nothing without its country. Three letters settle it every time, and they are the ISO 4217 code.
The dollar names more than twenty currencies
The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan all count in dollars, and their dollars have nothing to do with one another beyond the word. The name itself is European: it comes from the Joachimsthaler, a large silver coin struck in Bohemia in the sixteenth century, whose name shortened to thaler and then to dollar.
The ISO 4217 code removes every doubt in three letters: USD, CAD, AUD, NZD, SGD, HKD, TWD. One of them runs the other way round: XCD, the East Caribbean dollar, is a single currency shared by eight states and territories, from Antigua to Saint Vincent. Same name for many currencies on one side, one currency for many countries on the other.
The peso shares its sign with the dollar, and that is not a coincidence
Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay and the Philippines all count in pesos. The Philippine peso, on the far side of the Pacific, carries the same word for the same reason as the others: the Spanish silver coin that circulated worldwide, the piece of eight, from which the dollar also descends.
This shared ancestry left a trap that is still open. The dollar sign and the peso sign are the same character. A menu in Mexico City priced at $250 is priced in pesos, and a traveller who reads dollars misjudges the bill by an order of magnitude. Only the country tells you which, or the code: MXN, ARS, CLP, COP, CUP, DOP, UYU, PHP.
The franc, and two currencies that have the same value without being the same money
Switzerland counts in Swiss francs, CHF. Fourteen African countries count in CFA francs, and those are two distinct currencies, not one: XOF for the eight countries of the west, XAF for the six of central Africa. Both are pegged to the euro at the same fixed rate, 655.957 francs to the euro, and notes of one are still not accepted in the zone of the other.
That number is not a market rate but a legal constant, and it comes straight from our euro legacy pages: 655.957 is exactly one hundred times 6.55957, the rate at which the French franc entered the euro. The CFA franc was pegged at one hundred to the French franc, and the peg carried over unchanged. The Pacific keeps a third one, XPF, fixed at 119.33174 to the euro.
The pound was a pound, and its sign says so
The £ sign is a letter L, for libra, the Roman pound of weight. The currency was once literally that: a pound of silver, divided into 240 pennies. This is the only currency name on this page that is also a unit of mass, and the two meanings still share a symbol on our weight pages, lb, from the same libra.
Today the United Kingdom, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan, South Sudan and Syria all count in pounds, and the codes separate them: GBP, EGP, LBP, SDG, SSP, SYP. Closer to home there is a subtler case. Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man issue their own pounds, worth exactly one pound sterling each, and a shop in London is under no obligation to accept them.
The rupee, and the counting words that go with it
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mauritius and the Seychelles count in rupees, and Indonesia counts in rupiah, the same word by another road. The Maldives keeps a variant of its own, the rufiyaa. Nepal is the one fixed link in the set: the Nepalese rupee has been pegged to the Indian rupee at 1.6 to 1 since 1993.
The real trap in Indian prices is not the currency, it is the counting. Indian numbers group in lakhs and crores, not in millions: one lakh is a hundred thousand, one crore is ten million. A property listed at 1.5 crore is listed at fifteen million rupees, and a reader who counts in millions is out by a factor of ten.
The riyal, the rial, and the price tag that means ten times the code
Saudi Arabia and Qatar count in riyals, Oman and Yemen in rials, Iran in rials as well. The codes are SAR, QAR, OMR, YER and IRR, and the values behind them have nothing in common. The Omani rial does not divide into a hundred but into a thousand baisa, so its prices carry three decimals and not two.
Iran holds the sharpest trap of all, and it is not about which country. Prices in shops, on menus and in conversation are given in tomans, while the official currency and the ISO code are the rial, and one toman is ten rials. A price read as rials when it was quoted in tomans is off by a factor of ten, every time.
The hundredth is not universal
Almost every currency divides into a hundred, and that habit is so strong it passes for a rule. It is not one. ISO 4217 records the number of decimal places for each currency, and it is not always two: it is zero for the Japanese yen, the Korean won, the Icelandic krona and the Vietnamese dong, which have no subunit in daily use.
It runs the other way too. The Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Jordanian, Tunisian, Iraqi and Libyan dinars and the Omani rial divide into a thousand, so their amounts carry three decimals, and rounding one of them to two decimals loses a factor of ten on the last digit. Two currencies do not divide decimally at all: the Mauritanian ouguiya counts five khoums and the Malagasy ariary five iraimbilanja.