Quarter (United States Coin)
A quarter dollar, commonly shortened to quarter, is a coin worth ¼ of a United States dollar or 25 cents. The quarter has been produced since 1796. The choice of 25¢ as a denomination, as opposed to 20¢ which is more common in other parts of the world, originated with the practice of dividing Spanish Milled Dollars into eight wedge shaped segments (cf. "pieces of eight"); at one time "two bits", i.e. two wedges each wedge an eighth, thus a quarter of the Spanish real, was a common nickname for a quarter.
Read more about Quarter (United States Coin): Current Design, List of Designs, Silver Series, Copper-nickel Clad Series
Famous quotes containing the words quarter and/or states:
“Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)