Just thought of sharing this interesting financial phrase from the Chinese vocabulary- “Bank”.

In Chinese, it’s pronounced yin2 hang2. The ideogram is as follow:

The phrase 'bank' in Chinese is pronounced as 'yin2 hang2'

It literally means the movement (hang2) of silver (yin2). This is not to be confused with the “Free Silver Movement“. It basically means the flow of silver from one person to another, as silver is an important form of hard money back in the Chinese trading history. Smaller transactions often involved crushed silver while bigger transactions are done using silver taels.

Today, the term “Silver Movement” seems to have stuck and is labelled for financial institutions that deals with high volume of monetary transactions which we now call banks, even though these institutions do not literally move silvers around anymore.

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