Numismatic terminology question.

Gilbert

I know one half plus one half is two halves, but, regarding the half dollar:

Is the plural halfs, halves or is the proper terminology half dollars?

We call the plural of a quarter, quarters and not always quarter dollars, so ....

Hey, I don't have the answer, and hope someone else does.

JLW

Gilbert,
My dictionary lists halves as the plural of half. I would think half dollars would also be correct.
Joe

nwcs

I think the proper grammatical phrase would be:

Two half dollars

The plural of half is always halves so halfs is syntactically wrong. So two halves is also a correct phrase. Two quarters works because there is no elision of the final letter. And phonetically speaking, a fs sound (halfs) gets modified to ves to smooth out the sound. It's an artifact of the fact the root languages of english were far more inflected in tense, mood, and number. And since English has borrowed heavily from German, French, Latin, and Greek, there is a lot of room for these artifacts. Linguistics in fascinating. Even why we pronounce 'i' like 'eye' instead of 'eee' like most of the world (for example).

drsvenghali

Two halves or two half dollars is correct.

Two quarters or two quarter dollars is correct.

The only difference is how you pluralize a word ending in f and r. The "f is changed to "ve" before the "s" is added and the "r" just has the added "s". One of the oddities of the English language.