Other forms: coins, coined, coining
A coin is money made of metal: small, round, stamped with a face or a number, heavy in a pocket. The one you feed into a parking meter, the handful you tip into a charity box, the one you spin on the table while you think.
Coins together are change or loose change, so in a shop you ask for change rather than for coins. There is a verb too, and it has nothing to do with money: to coin a word or a phrase is to invent it — the word robot was coined in 1920. Fixed phrases: toss a coin, flip a coin, two sides of the same coin for two halves of one thing, the other side of the coin for the opposite view. Cryptocurrencies borrowed the word for units that never take metal form.
1nouncoinA small flat round piece of metal used as money.~96%
“He dropped a coin into the machine and waited.”
2verbinventTo invent a new word or expression.~2%
“Nobody is sure who coined the phrase.”
3verbstampingTo make coins by stamping metal.~2%
“Silver has been coined at this mint since 1660.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
coin is a piece of money.
A coin is named after the tool that made it. Middle English coyn came from Old French coigne, "wedge, cornerstone, die for stamping", from Latin cuneus, "wedge" — the wedge-shaped die that struck the design into the blank metal. English already had a word for it, mynt, which survives as mint, the place where coins are made.
Middle English
coyn
English, today
coin
From Middle English coyn. From Middle English coyn, from Old French coigne (“wedge, cornerstone, die for stamping”), from Latin cuneus (“wedge”). a doublet of coign and cuneus. See also quoin (“cornerstone”). Displaced mynt, from mynet (whence modern English mint), which was derived from monēta.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA