How many ridges are on a quarter

Q: What are the ridges on a quarter called?

Reeded edges are often referred to as ridged or grooved (US usage), or milled (UK usage). Some coins, such as United States quarters and dimes, have reeded edges. Reeding of edges was introduced to prevent coin clipping and counterfeiting.

The stylish rims you might have noticed on U.S. dimes, quarters, half dollars and some dollar coins are called reeded edges. They’ve been on American currency almost since day one as a way of keeping people honest.

Table of Contents Show

Why is there 119 grooves on a quarter?
How many ridges are in a nickel?
Why is there 118 ridges on a dime?
What are the ridges on a quarter called?

The United States Mint built its first minting facility in Philadelphia in 1792. The following March, it produced its first batch of circulating coins - 11,178 copper pennies. The silver coins that soon followed were linked to a silver standard, per the 1792 Mint and Coinage Act. This meant the “major” coins were at least partially made up of the precious metal (the first dollar coin, from 1794, was 89.25% silver and 10.75% copper). Silver dollars contained about a dollar’s worth of silver, give or take, and the others – half dollars, quarters and dimes – had a proportionate metallic content and size. Half-dollar coins contained ½ the amount of silver as a dollar and were half the size, quarters had ¼ the amount of silver, and so on.

Reeded edges served a two-fold security purpose for silver coins. One, they added an additional, intricate element to the coins that made them more difficult to counterfeit. Two, they prevented fraud.

For as long as coins have been made from precious metal, a fairly common way to make a quick, ill-gotten buck was coin clipping. Clippers would shave off a tiny amount of metal all the way around the rims of a bunch of coins, collect the shavings, then sell them. Working carefully, a coin clipper could trim enough off of coins to make a nice profit, but not so much as to make them noticeably lighter or smaller. A clipper could then still go out and spend his devalued coins as if they were unaltered. Reeded edges ruined this scheme, since a shaved edge would be immediately obvious and alert anyone who received one that something was wrong.

Why don't nickels and pennies have reeded edges? Nickels and pennies are mainly composed of inexpensive metals, so the chances that they would be tampered with are low.

Before their adoption by the U.S. Mint, reeded edges were also used in the UK. When the physicist Isaac Newton became warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, he used reeded edges, among other means, to combat clippers and counterfeiters. Other European coins from as far back as the early 1500s also feature reeded edges.

Due to the abandonment of the silver standard and a worldwide silver shortage in the mid-20th century, the Coinage Act of 1965 authorized a change in the composition of dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, gradually shrinking their silver content down to the present-day 0%. Coin clipping is no longer a problem, but reeded edges are still around, a centuries-old security measure hanging on in an age where people pay for things with their smart phones instead of digging out pocket change. The tenacity is admirable. But why are they still there?

Coins are made by stamping coin blanks with a metal tool called a die. The die is engraved with the negative of a coin’s design, and the positive image is transferred to the coin when stamped. When the coins are struck, a part of the die called the collar holds the blank in place and applies the edge. When the silverless coins were first produced, the government didn’t see any need to make or buy expensive new dies or collars. Keeping the reeding wouldn’t hurt anyone, they figured, so the new coins were struck from the same old dies as the old ones, and reeding continued to be used as a matter of tradition and backwards-compatibility. Newer coins with updated designs (state quarters, new portraits) also have reeded edges. The design element lived to see another day on the new dies because reeding is useful for distinguishing coins by feel as well as appearance, making them more user-friendly for the visually impaired.

If you gather up a bunch of coins, you'll see that not all reeded edges are created equal. The number and size of reeds on coins is not dictated by law, so individual U.S. Mints were long free to make their reeds to their own in-house specifications, leading to distinct style differences between coins from different mints and eras. Rare dimes from the now-defunct Carson City Mint’s 1871-74 runs, for example, have 89 broad, widely spaced reeds. The dimes made by the Philadelphia Mint in those same years have 113 thin, tightly-spaced reeds.

Things are a little more standardized now and the Mint lists its reeding specifications as follows: dimes, 118; quarters, 119; half dollars, 150; dollar, 198; Susan B. Anthony dollar, 133.

There are 119 ridges or reeds on the edge of a quarter, 118 on the dime and 150 on the edge of the half dollar (mostly now a collectible).

The 1792 Coinage Act established the U.S. Mint and specified that $10, $5 and $2.50 coins (known as eagles, half-eagles and quarter-eagles) were to be made of their face value in gold, while dollar, half-dollar, quarter-dollar, dime and half-dime coins were to be made of their value in silver. Cent and half-cent coins were made of cheaper copper.

Criminals saw that they could make a good profit by filing shavings from the sides of gold and silver coins, selling the precious metal. Before the 18th-century was out, the U.S. Mint began adding ridges to the coins’ edges, a process called “reeding”, in order to make it impossible to shave them down without the result being obvious. The reeded edges also made coin design more intricate and counterfeiting more difficult.

The U.S. Mint stopped producing all gold coins during the Great Depression, after an executive order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A silver crisis in the 1960s led that metal to be gradually phased out as well. Today’s coins contain no precious metals but those ridges, at least on half-dollars, quarters, dimes and some dollar coins are still there. This is primarily to make the coins distinguishable from each other, by feel as well as appearance, enabling visually impaired people to tell the difference between similarly sized coins, like the dime and penny.

More Info: www.usmint.gov

Why is there 119 grooves on a quarter?

In the US, quarters, and dimes, half dollars, and dollar coins, all used to have some silver content, and that was why they had ridges–to stop clipping. We kept the ridges as a design feature even with the silver now gone. So, the ridges make clipped coins easier to detect, making clipping more difficult.

How many ridges are in a nickel?

The nickel and penny have no grooves along their edge, while the dime and quarter do. Why do some coins have ridges while others do not?

Why is there 118 ridges on a dime?

While illegal, it was diﬃcult to catch because coins were irregularly shaped due to crude manufacturing methods. To prevent this from happening, the U.S. Mint added reeded (ridged) edges to coins. There are 118 ridges on dimes, 119 on quarters, 150 on half dollars, and 133 on Susan B.

What are the ridges on a quarter called?

Reeded edges are often referred to as "ridged" or "grooved" (US usage), or "milled" (UK usage). Some coins, such as United States quarters and dimes, have reeded edges. Reeding of edges was introduced to prevent coin clipping and counterfeiting.