dollar

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dol·lar / ˈdälər/ • n. the basic monetary unit of the U.S., Canada, Australia, and certain countries in the Pacific, Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.PHRASES: dollars to doughnuts inf. used to emphasize one's certainty: I'd bet dollars to doughnuts he's a medical student.ORIGIN: from early Flemish or Low German daler, from German T(h)aler, short for Joachimsthaler, a coin from the silver mine of Joachimsthal (‘Joachim's valley’), now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic. The term was later applied to a coin used in the Spanish-American colonies, which was also widely used in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution, hence adopted as the name of the U.S. monetary unit in the late 18th cent.

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