Why thousand is called a grand

Your comments frequently make an invaluable contribution to the story of words and phrases in everyday usage over many years. Yes, I know that makes no sense. By the way, that book is still for sale in many places. Please do not buy it. It was last updated in , which, in internet terms, was approximately the 15th century. I always thought this had something to do with the crime of grand theft, which at least in some places meant the theft of at least a thousand dollars. Great, Famous, Important, or Exalted are my preferred uses for the word.

My last name is Grandone and I have searched long and hard to find its origin. That is, since I am none of the above, just curious where such a curious name came from. Wish someone knew. Please let me know if anyone out there has the facts. Have a grand evening. You can look up the meaning of the name by going to Google and asking for the origin of the name.

Good luck. On the Internet, 1K is used to represent 1 thousand and 10K is used to represent 10 thousand, similarly, 1M is used to represent 1 million.

Bucks are dollars — dollars — and a grand is dollars. The buck also refers to the U. Fin is for Five. In finance, a Monkey is British slang for pounds sterling. The term monkey came from soldiers returning from India, where the rupee note had a picture of a monkey on it. The term comes from the picture on an Indian 25 Rupee bank note. The cost of a good pony can be the same or higher than a horse. The cost of buying a horse may seem prohibitive, but here are five budget-friendly horse breeds to consider when making your dream a reality.

Different factors influence the market value of a horse. The five cheapest breeds to buy in America are Arabians, thoroughbreds, quarter horses, mustangs, and rescue horses. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. And in many parts of the United States, "dollars" are still referred to as "bucks. I can find no credence for the notion, put forth by some activist clergy, that using the word "bucks" for "dollars" is racist, referring to young male slaves being called "bucks" because they were used as beasts of burden and were traded for tangible goods.

Earlier this week, I asked a young acquaintance about the tuition charged for a school we were discussing. He replied, "It's about 20 grand a year. So, here is how it happened.

As with bucks, the exact history as to how "grand" came to mean "one thousand dollars" is very uncertain. But here's the predominant consensus. In the 15th century, the Old French word "grant" stemming from the Latin grandis meaning great or large , was adopted into English as "grand.

The use of "grand" to refer to money dates from the early s and as disconcerting as it may be to some people, comes from America's underworld. The mob was always looking for language to use as code words for money. Nearly everything the mob did was traceable to money secured by illegitimate or violent means, and mob families were always in search for words that could be used to disguise any reference to money.

They came up with a number of different terms that now are used as slang for money by the population in general. In this day and age when government budgets of all developed countries are in "billions" of dollars, one might think one thousand dollars is a mere pittance. But in the early s one thousand dollars was considered to be a "grand" sum of money, and the underground adopted "grand" as a code word for one thousand dollars.

The mob in Europe adopted the same term, and now "grand" is worldwide slang for one thousand dollars. The mob has had considerable influence on developing a special "underground" vocabulary for money.