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Money goes by many different names in English. In America, we have our own slang terms for money. Some of them are shared by British folks, and some of them are not. Here, you will find some of the most common slang terms for money to help you understand and speak American English like a native.
You don’t necessarily have to use these terms, but what’s important is that you know them and understand them so that when you are listening to native speakers, you can understand what they are saying.
Informal Words For Money
One of the most common slang terms for money in America is buck or bucks.
A buck is one dollar or a dollar bill.
It is believed that this term refers to deer-skins or ‘buckskins’ being used for bartering.
If you have five bucks you have five dollars.
I remember when a soda cost less than a buck. Heck, I remember when they cost a quarter.
Big bucks is any large amount of money.
Another everyday slang term for money is cash.
Cash means money in general, but it especially refers to actual physical money as opposed to any other kind of monetary funds.
Sometimes this term is intensified to ‘cash money‘ to reinforce when actual physical money is being referred to.
“You want to buy my car? I’ll only take cash money. No checks.”
Money is also commonly referred to as dough.
Dough means money in general.
We don’t really know how dough came to mean money.
However, just as common is the word bread for money.
Since bread has long been a subsistence food or staple, even a “staple of life,” it’s easy to see why it would be used to refer to money.
Dough may have been a natural off-shoot since bread starts out as dough before it’s baked. Or, it may have been the other way around.
In fact, food terms are popular for referring to money. If you like bread, you might love cake. Yes, money is sometimes called cake, although this is rare.
Keeping to the theme of baked goods, money might be biscuits or Bisquick.
Bisquick is a popular flour mix used to make biscuits or pancakes. Again, this is rare.
Other food-related money terms reference the color of U.S. paper currency.
The most common, but not often heard today, is cabbage. An obvious reference to the green color of our money.
The terms lettuce and broccoli are also used.
More simply, paper money is sometimes called greenbacks.
For some unknown reason, money can be called cheddar, as in cheddar cheese, and also just cheese.
How cheese or cheddar came to refer to money is anybody’s guess.
When the new U.S. 100 dollar bill came out in 2009, people started calling it blue cheese, referencing the blue-hue of the bill.
Another term for money, in general, is scratch.
“I don’t have the scratch right now but I’ll pay you next paycheck.”
We don’t know how this one originated but I wonder if it has anything to do with chicken scratch, a common feed mixture for chickens in the U.S.
Hmm…probably not.
Here are some other specific terms for paper money:
Besides bucks, one-dollar bills are often called singles.
We tend to use this term when we are asking someone to change a higher denomination bill.
“Do you have five singles for a five?”
The word bill itself is also used to refer to paper money. “That’ll be ten bills.”
Benjamins
A benjamin is a one hundred dollar bill. This is a reference to Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait is on the one-hundred-dollar bill.
A one-hundred-dollar bill is sometimes called a hundie. This is obviously a silly way to say hundred. Hundo is another.
A Lincoln is a five-dollar bill. Five-dollar bills hold a portrait of Abraham Lincoln or honest-Abe, our sixteenth president.
A five-dollar bill might also be referred to as a fiver or a five-spot.
A ten-dollar bill might be called a ten-spot or a tenner.
Another word for a ten-dollar bill, rarely heard today, is a sawbuck.
This refers to the Roman numeral X and its similarity to a sawbuck, otherwise known as a sawhorse.
Another general word for money is moolah (or moola). We don’t really know the origin of this one.
Money is also called coin. This is a reference to metal coins but it refers to coins or paper money. It’s a general term for money.
Paper money is also called dead presidents, referring to the fact that most of our bills hold portraits of former, now deceased, presidents.
These terms are not the only slang for money in America, but the rest of them are so obscure and rarely used, I’d be wasting your time to explain them.
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