Money: Where Your Salary Gets Its Name

Game Gems Team · 2026-07-13

Money is the rare quiz category where everyone has daily experience and almost no one knows the history.

Paper, and where it came from

Paper money was not a European idea. It was developed in China, centuries before it appeared in the West, and it startled European travellers who could not understand why anyone would accept a printed note in exchange for goods. The answer — because everyone else does — is still the whole basis of the system.

Salt and salary

The English word salary traces back to the Latin salarium, which is tied to sal, salt. The exact mechanism is argued over — whether Roman soldiers were paid in salt, or given an allowance to buy it — but the link between the word for your monthly pay and the word for the stuff on your chips is real. "Worth his salt" comes from the same place.

When money stops working

Zimbabwe's hyperinflation in the late 2000s ended with the central bank printing a one hundred trillion dollar note. It was not enough for a bus fare. The notes now sell to collectors for more than they were ever worth as currency, which is a joke money occasionally plays on itself.

Hyperinflation is not a Zimbabwean peculiarity — Weimar Germany, Hungary after the war, and several others have been there. It is what happens when the thing everyone agreed to believe in stops being believed.

Borrowed currencies

Several countries do not print their own money at all. Ecuador, El Salvador and Panama use the US dollar. The euro is the official currency of around twenty EU member states, which means those governments gave up the ability to devalue their way out of a crisis — a trade-off economists are still arguing about.

Names to know

  • The pound sterling is among the oldest currencies still in use anywhere.
  • The bolívar, Venezuela's currency, is named after Simón Bolívar — as is Bolivia.
  • "Buck" for a dollar most likely comes from buckskin, once traded as a unit of value.
  • Bitcoin appeared in 2009, published under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is still unknown.
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