Editing Thaler (section)

==Etymology==
German ''taler'' is recorded from the 1530s, as an abbreviation of ''Joachimstaler''. The silver mines at [[Jáchymov|Joachimstal]]  had opened in 1516, and the first such coins were minted there in 1518.
The original spelling was ''taler'' (so [[Erasmus Alberus|Alberus]] 1540).
German ''-taler'' means "of the valley" (cf. ''[[Neanderthal#Etymology|Neanderthaler]]'').
By the late 16th century, the word was variously spelled as German ''taler'', ''toler'', ''thaler'', ''thaller''; Low German ''daler'', ''dahler''.
In 18th to 19th-century German orthography, ''Thaler'' became standard, changed to ''Taler'' in the  [[German Orthographic Conference of 1901|1902 spelling reform]].

The name ''taler'', ''thaler'' was soon used in compounds denoting various types of silver coins of thaler size, thus ''[[Reichstaler]]'' (1566),  ''Silbertaler'',  ''Albertustaler'' (1612), ''Laubthaler'' (1726), ''Kronenthaler'' (1755), ''Ortsthaler'', ''[[Schützentaler]]'', ''Bankthaler'',  ''Speciethaler'', etc.

Units used in the [[Netherlands]] include the {{lang|nl|daalder}}, the ''rijksdaalder'' and the {{lang|nl|leeuwendaalder}}. From 1754, many German states used the ''[[Conventionsthaler]]'' as well as a lower-valued ''[[North German thaler]]'' or ''Reichsthaler'' worth {{frac|3|4}} the Conventionsthaler. From 1840 the various North German thalers converged to the value of the [[Prussian thaler]] and afterwards the ''[[Vereinsthaler]]''.

The corresponding English silver coin of the period was the ''[[Crown (English coin)|crown]]''. The Low German word was adopted in English as ''daler'' by 1550, modified to ''dollar'' by about 1600.<ref>Christian Ludwig, ''Teutsch-Englisches Lexicon'' (1789), [https://books.google.com/books?id=DCj8dJG29fgC&pg=RA1-PA447 c.448] gives ''dollar, doller'' as the English translation of ''Thaler''.</ref>
English ''thaler'' was introduced in the first half of the 19th century to refer to the coins of the German states, as the word ''dollar'' was increasingly understood to refer to the [[United States dollar]].