coin
/kɔɪn
/noun
1A flat disc or piece of metal with an official stamp, used as money: she opened her purse and took out a coin gold and silver coins...
- As he was speaking he drew from his pocket a gold coin, a twenty-krone piece, and placed it on the table at which I sat.
- If you do not wish to spend this kind of money for the coins, the four stamps can be bought for 50 baht in unused condition.
- Though it has little tangible value in the physical sense beyond the paper it is printed on or metal the coin is made from, cash has a very real value in the commercial world.
Synonyms
piece, bit
1.1 [mass noun] Money in the form of coins: large amounts of coin and precious metal...
- I then proceeded carefully to count out the entire 14 pounds 78 pence in coin, rummaging in the depths of my coin-purse to retrieve the whole sum.
- As an agent of the crown, he took foreign coin, old coin, and bullion to the Mint, where it was converted into new currency.
- When players decide to cash out, they can receive it in coin or in the form of a ticket with the amount encoded on it.
1.2 (coins) One of the suits in some tarot packs, corresponding to pentacles in others.The point is won by whichever team takes more cards of the coins suit (or diamonds if you are using international cards)....
- It was the later French adaptation which changed swords to spades, wands to clubs, cups to hearts, and coins to diamonds.
- You could have the suits as modern equivalents of the suit symbols, for coins you could have credit cards, cups cans of soft drinks or lattes, wands keys, swords mobile phones or pens.
verb [with object]
1Make (coins) by stamping metal: guineas and half-guineas were coined...
- Since the one who has money sets the rules, it is no wonder that the man who coins money is wealthy.
- As a member of the nobility, he had certain rights and responsibilities: he could raise troops and command them in the field, he held his own courts of justice, he could coined his own money.
- The Romans encouraged this situation by infusing coined money into provincial agrarian economies, which in turn led to money loans and further debt.
Synonyms
mint, stamp, stamp out, strike, cast, punch, die, mould, forge, make, manufacture, produce
1.1Make (metal) into coins.From ages past, before the time of the Bible, man has coined metal to be used as money....
- Much German silver taken to England to pay for wool was then coined.
1.2British informal Earn a lot of (money) quickly and easily: the company was coining it in at the rate of £90 a second...
- If Miss Miles was by Charlotte Brontë, there was no reason on earth for not proclaiming the fact to the skies and coining money from it.
- Volvo, by contrast, is coining money and the arrival of a brand new Focus at the Paris Show should aid Ford's recovery.
- Home care assistant Audrey Sands is using pedal power to help coin in cash for Manorlands hospice.
2Invent (a new word or phrase): he coined the term ‘desktop publishing’...
- Known for his penchant for coining apt words and phrases, Tukey is credited with inventing the word bit (binary digit) in 1946, and he was responsible for the first use of several terms in mathematical statistics.
- I'd like to recommend The Word Spy, a fascinating website that collects recently coined words and phrases from the media.
- Visionary and inventor Buckminster Fuller coined the phrase ‘Think global, act local’.
Synonyms
invent, create, make up, devise, conceive, originate, think up, dream up, formulate, fabricate
Phrases
the other side of the coin
pay someone back in their own coin
to coin a phrase
Origin
Middle English: from Old French coin 'wedge, corner, die', coigner 'to mint', from Latin cuneus 'wedge'. The original sense was 'cornerstone', later 'angle or wedge' (senses now spelled quoin); in late Middle English the term denoted a die for stamping money, or a piece of money produced by such a die.