Why Do Some Coins Have Notches (Reeding) On The Edge, While Others Don’t?

Coins have ridges, called reeded edges, because the practice was first designed to stop people shaving metal from the rims of gold and silver coins (a fraud known as clipping). Today, US dimes, quarters and half dollars keep the ridges, while nickels and pennies have smooth edges because they were never valuable enough to clip.

When you walk down the street, coins jangling in your pocket, it’s nice to know that you have some spare change on hand, but how often do you ever stop and think about those quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies? Have you ever considered why those coins are different sizes? What they’re made of? And, perhaps most mysteriously, why some coins have ridges on the edges, while others don’t?

If you blindly go through life accepting the way things are, then this probably isn’t the site for you, but if your curiosity is piqued, then read on, to learn once and for all why some types of coin currencies are notched on the edges.

Short Answer: The notched edges on certain coins, known as reeded edges, were initially designed to stop people from filing or shaving the rims down when coins were made of more precious metals like gold and silver.

Coins And Criminals

Today, coins are almost exclusively made from copper, nickel and zinc (rather inexpensive metals), so coins are not actually worth their weight in that particular metal. However, that wasn’t always the case. Back in 18th and 19th century America, your pocketful of coins was worth quite a bit more than it is now, relatively speaking. In the 1800s, there were also quite a few more coins in existence, including $10, $5 and $2.50 gold pieces. These three coins were made of an equivalent amount of gold ($10 coin = $10 in gold, $5 coin = $5 in gold, etc.). Smaller denominations, including the dollar, half-dollar, quarter, dime and the silver half dime (the five-cent piece that came before the modern nickel), were worth their weight in silver. The one-cent coin had been around since 1793, but back then it was a chunky pure-copper piece, not the small bronze cent that arrived in 1864.

As you can see, walking around with a pocketful of change made of pure gold and silver was a lot more exciting than having your pants weighed down by “useless” change today. This also presented an opportunity for less savory individuals to take advantage of the design and carefully file off the edges of these gold and silver coins. The shavings weren’t much, but they certainly added up, and if the process was done precisely enough, it was very difficult to tell when a coin had been shaved down. Essentially, $0.50 to $1 of value could be shaved off, yet the $9 or $9.50 coin could still be used to buy $10 of goods. This sneaky behavior was known as coin clipping, and it became a real problem, as it devalued the currency, but many people were doing it!

When enough shavings had been gathered, these criminals could trade in the precious metal and make a tidy profit. This didn’t escape the notice of the US government, who was in charge of regulating currency, and they had to come up with a solution. The clever political minds of the time came up with the idea of adding those recognizable notches to the edges of coins, a process called “reeding”, when the coins were made.

To be fair, this wasn’t the first time the idea had been tried. Machine-struck (milled) coinage reached England back in the 1500s, but reeded edges as a deliberate anti-clipping measure were really cemented at the Royal Mint in the 1690s, when none other than Sir Isaac Newton, then the Mint’s warden, oversaw a massive recoinage that replaced ragged hand-hammered coins with crisp, machine-made ones. So when the young United States adopted reeding, it was borrowing a trick already proven across Europe (America has never had a problem stealing good ideas from other nations, cough, cough, the National Anthem). The payoff was the same on either side of the Atlantic: if the edge of a coin was shaved off to steal some of that precious metal, the missing ridges made it obvious to business owners and bankers, who could reject the coin or send it back to the government to be destroyed.

Now, for those of you with a handful of coins in front of you, one thing has surely not escaped your notice: only half-dollars, quarters and dimes have these ridges (and the $10, $5 and $2.50 gold coins no longer exist). The U.S. Mint is precise about it, too. A dime carries 118 reeds, a quarter 119 and a half dollar 150. The coins of lesser value, such as the nickel (and later the penny), were never valuable enough to be worth clipping, so the ridges were left off and their edges stayed smooth.

Reeding Coins In The Modern World

The story isn’t over there, however. The gold standard for coins was abandoned during the Great Depression, and silver followed in 1965, when the Coinage Act stripped the precious metal out of circulating dimes and quarters (the half dollar was cut to 40% silver, then went silver-free by 1971). This meant new coin compositions had to be used, ones of considerably lower value. Now, despite their color, modern quarters and dimes contain 0% silver, and the nickel never held any to begin with; instead they are packed with those cheaper elements mentioned earlier (copper, nickel and zinc). In other words, when someone throws coins at you, they’re not being all that generous.

When this change occurred, the US Mint saw no reason to replace all of the machinery that had been outfitted with the technology to apply the reeding to these coins, so the tradition continued. That may seem like a rather unsatisfying answer, but in truth, there is a greater purpose that people didn’t realize until the 20th century. Having some coins with ridges and some without helped to differentiate between similarly sized coins (pennies and dimes/nickels and quarters). With quarters and dimes that contain the reeding, as well as nickels and pennies that don’t, it helps people who have vision impairment know which coins they are about to spend on a purchase, or prevent them from jamming a nickel repeatedly into a gumball machine.

The ironic thing, of course, is that coins are far less frequently used in the United States than they once were, due to the availability and convenience of paper currency. So while this solution for visually impaired people is excellent when it comes to coins, all paper currency is presently the same size, which is not the case in many other countries. In the Eurozone, Australia, Malaysia, just to name a few, each denomination of currency is a different size. In other countries, such as Canada, clever currency designers have even included Braille on the bills to make them more recognizable.

Maybe it’s time for the United States to steal a few more ideas and keep up with the changing times!