The Roman empire’s legacy in the modern world is hard to overstate. So much of what we expect a state to look like comes from the Roman model. An empire two millennia and an ocean away from Ancient Rome having a Senate meet to pass laws in building with a bunch of columns and a big dome is pretty on the nose.

But Rome’s legacy also reaches places we might not notice – perhaps because the connection is less direct, or because it’s such a part of our everyday lives that it rarely catches our attention. For example, some of the words we use for money come directly from the Roman system of currency.

Let’s start with the word “money” itself. The word comes from the Temple of Juno Moneta, via French (as so many Latinate words in English do). This specific temple in Rome was where coins were minted – “mint” coming from the same Latin word, but via Germanic languages rather than French.¹

What kind of coins were minted there? One was the denarius, from which we get (for example) the Spanish word for money (dinero). The denarius would influence coinage in the Islamic caliphates, and from there would evolve into the modern “dinar”. Today, currencies named “dinar” are in use in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Tunisia.

Another, originally the least valuable, was the “as”, from which we get “ace”, the name of the playing card with a single pip. From this use in turn came a new meaning as money, specifically a now old-fashioned slang for a single dollar bill.

The solidus was a coin minted later in Roman history, in the 4^th century CE, after the mint moved away from the Temple of Juno Moneta. The English world “soldier” comes from this coin, as soldiers in this era of Rome were paid with solidi. The solidus’s actual coin descendants include the medieval French sou. In Quebec, sou is still a term used for Canadian cents. Because of French colonialism, the modern Vietnamese dong is also divided into 100 xu, but the xu isn’t in practical use anymore because inflation has rendered it effectively worthless.

The solidus and denarius have another, more distant set of descendants: pounds, shillings, and pence. When Charlemagne reformed the money system in his Frankish empire, a few centuries after the end of the Western Roman Empire, he set up three new units of money. The largest coin was the Librum or Pfund, based on a unit of weight, while the smallest coin was a new edition of the denarius. In between was the solidus, now also called the schilling, which wasn’t actually minted as a coin but rather used to make currency calculations easier. 12 denarii made a schilling, and 20 schillings made a pfund.

This system made its way to Britain, where it formed the core of the pre-decimal money system of Britain, and later its many colonies. The pound symbol (£), used for both the UK currency and the US unit of weight, is a stylized “L” for librum. During the middle ages, denarii evolved into pennies. And although UK stopped making shillings when it decimalized in 1971, several countries in East Africa still use shillings as name of their modern, decimalized currencies: Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, and the unrecognized state of Somaliland.

Today’s currencies are much more standardized than Ancient Rome’s. But these Roman origins are just one way that decisions made millennia ago are still impacting the world today.

Coming Soon: My new favorite map projection, and why it matters.