A coin of account is a unit of money that does not exist as an actual coin (that is, a metal disk) but is used in figuring prices or other amounts of money.
Famous quotes containing the words coin of, coin and/or account:
“It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)
“Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixt you,—the trade drops at once: and this is the reason ... why travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,—owing to their [the natives’] suspicion ... that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation ... worth the trouble of their bad language.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)