Pylimitics

Just to show that it isn’t just obscure words that have interesting stories…

Back in the 900s if you asked someone for “bread” in the British Isles, you’d either get a random piece of some kind of food or a blank stare. The word “bread” was rarely used at that time, and didn’t mean what we mean by it. They did have “bread,” but they called it “hlaf,” which is the predecessor to “loaf.” 

It wasn’t until the 1200s that “bread” began to mean the baked stuff we know of as bread. That meaning is still current, of course, but in the early 1700s another meaning arose; the metaphorical sense of “bread” as general livelihood. The character Robinson Crusoe, in that book published in 1719, uses “bread” thusly:

“I was under no Necessity of seeking my Bread.”

Another couple of centuries passed. “Bread” still meant the edible product of bakeries, and the metaphorical sense persisted, but gradually became less common. But then in the 20th century another metaphorical meaning arose. “Bread” began to mean “money”. This seems to have begun as slang among jazz musicians. The 1939 book Jazzmen included this:

“Inside the low, smoky room, the musicians sweated for their bread.”

There’s another baked-goods-related term for money, of course: “dough”. The use of “dough” to mean money actually predates the use of “bread” for the same thing by nearly two centuries; the earliest citation is from 1851, when the Yale Tomahawk magazine said:

“He thinks he will pick his way out of the Society’s embarrassments, provided he can get sufficient dough.”

Both “bread” and “dough” as terms for money probably come from the earlier use of “bread” to mean livelihood — and the same effect is probably at work in some other slang terms in which edibles have meant money. At various times “bread and butter”, “cabbage”, “cake”, “peanuts”, and “cheese” — including the varieties “cheddar” and “gouda” — have all been used to mean cash. 

There are lots of terms for money, of course. Although most of the edible ones can probably be traced back to the original metaphorical use of “bread” (the exception being “cabbage,” which was exclusive to the US and probably came from the green ink in US paper money), there are many others whose origins are completely unknown. “Moola,” for example, arose as a term for money sometime around 1920, but nobody knows where it came from or whether it’s based on anything else. 

“Buck” is also a word that’s been used to mean money — in fact a specific amount; one dollar. It might have come from the use of “buckskins” as units of exchange in the early days of European settlement of North America. But it may have some other origin; “buck” has quite a number of meanings, from “passing the buck” to lye used for washing clothes to any kind of jig used to hold parts during assembly to a shoe, a male deer or goat (or some other species), to a kind of jump performed by some of those species if you try to sit on their back. 

“Boodle” is another word for money — instead of one dollar, “boodle” generally means a large amount of cash — and this one’s origin is pretty well established. It comes from the early 1600s America, when settlers began to arrive in large numbers from various European countries. When they got to North America they often interacted and learned at least a bit of each others’ languages, and “boodle” was the English version of the Dutch word “boedel” (property). 

“Loot” can mean money, especially stolen money (or other stolen goods). So it probably makes sense that “loot” itself was swiped from another language — Hindi, in which “lut” (with a long “u”) means stealing. 

At this point you’re probably wondering where “money” came from! It’s not as old a word as you might think; it arose in the 1200s from the Old French word “monoie” (same meaning), which in turn came from the Latin word “Moneta”. “Moneta” was apparently the surname of the Roman goddess Juno. When the Romans minted coins, they did so either inside or next door to one of the temples to Juno. Another closely related Latin word is “monere”, which means “warning” or “advice”. “Monere” is the source of “monitor” and “admonish”, and it’s possible that “Juno Moneta” was the “admonishing goddess” — but nobody is quite sure, and in any case “money” simply comes from the location of Roman coin factories, not from the meaning of “monere” or “Moneta”. 

The Romans probably had slang terms for money too, but “bread” wouldn’t have been one of them — “bread” has germanic roots, not Latin. Latin had “pane,” “panis,” and “crustum” for bread. Maybe one of those was their slang for money — but on the other hand, Latin had plenty of ways to refer to money: argentum, pecunia, viaticus, and armarium (and those are just the easy ones). So maybe they didn’t need another one, but I wouldn’t bet a boodle on it.