Why Is a Dollar Called a ‘Buck’?

Whether you’re talking about clams, moolah, Benjamins, or simoleons, there’s no shortage of English slang for money. Among the most popular terms is the word “buck,” which is so commonplace, you may not have even realized it’s slang. It can be used to refer to a single U.S. dollar, or in common expressions such as “borrow a few bucks” and “make a quick buck” (in reference to earning a sum of money). To better understand where the word comes from, however, we need to go back to the early 18th century, a time before the U.S. adopted federally issued paper currency.

During the 1700s, deer hides — also called buckskins — were commonly used in trades between American frontiersmen and North American Indigenous communities. Animal pelts were viewed as durable and highly valuable, and they became a driving force of the bartering economy.

In an interview with Reader’s Digest, lexicographer Grant Barrett proposes a theory that “buck” came from “buckskin,” claiming that buckskins were bartered far and wide in the Americas by the 1740s. Britannica further notes the appearance of the abbreviation “bucks” (for “buckskins”) in a trader’s journal from 1748. Essentially, trading one buckskin was paying one buck for goods. While this theory connects bucks to bartering, we don’t find published evidence of it as slang for cash until the 1850s.  

The United States had an interesting journey to get to the bills in your wallet today. The Coinage Act of 1792 established the U.S. Mint and regulated coins, but not banknotes. Paper currency can be traced to the 17th and 18th centuries — individual colonies issued their own currency, and continental currency was issued during the Revolutionary War — but there was not a national paper currency until 1861.

While the buckskin explanation is considered the most reputable, Barrett proposed two other commonly discussed theories in his interview with Reader’s Digest. One is that “buck” is derived from the poker table: An item was passed around the table to signify when a new jackpot must be made, and it was common to use a buckhorn-handled knife for this job. This usage might be the origin of the phrase “pass the buck,” which describes shifting responsibility onto someone else.

Another theory is that “buck” is a shortened version of “sawbuck,” an early nickname for the $10 bill. The earliest $10 notes featured a big “X” on the back — the Roman numeral for 10. This “X” evoked images of an X-shaped wooden rack known as a sawbuck, leading to the slang. However, the $10 bill was released in 1861, and evidence of the slang term “buck” connected to U.S. currency dates to the decade prior. Thus, the buckskin trading theory seems most likely.