The Collaborative International Dictionary
Currency \Cur"ren*cy\ (k?r"r?n-c?), n.; pl. Currencies (-s?z). [Cf. LL. currentia a current, fr. L. currens, p. pr. of currere to run. See Current.]
A continued or uninterrupted course or flow like that of a stream; as, the currency of time. [Obs.]
--Ayliffe.The state or quality of being current; general acceptance or reception; a passing from person to person, or from hand to hand; circulation; as, a report has had a long or general currency; the currency of bank notes.
That which is in circulation, or is given and taken as having or representing value; as, the currency of a country; a specie currency; esp., government or bank notes circulating as a substitute for metallic money.
Fluency; readiness of utterance. [Obs.]
-
Current value; general estimation; the rate at which anything is generally valued.
He . . . takes greatness of kingdoms according to their bulk and currency, and not after intrinsic value.
--Bacon.The bare name of Englishman . . . too often gave a transient currency to the worthless and ungrateful.
--W. Irving.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of currency English)
Usage examples of "currencies".
Several papers are running front-page stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies, but this isn’t all that new.
He works in the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange.
It's about who rules next, who fixes the currencies, who dominates the markets, who gets the raw materials and exploits the very cheap labor of the primitive continents!
Countries, borders, passports, visas, languages, laws, currencies, were to him unreal elements in a tawdry risky game played on the European land mass.
They didn't have enough wealth to buy into the private-money system, or enough contacts or market smarts to use private currencies effectively.
After that terrible revelation, there'd been savage runs on most national currencies and the stock markets had collapsed.
Nowadays, for a lot of people, private currencies were just the way money was.
You could still use government currencies if you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake of simplicity or though lack of alternatives.
Government-issued currencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind.
Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, had already lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwaters of currency trading as early as the 1990s.
T-Bills as a hedge against the struggling European economies and their currencies suddenly felt quite uneasy about holding them.
To hedge against the resulting weakness of their own currencies, they'd bought dollars and American T-Bills.
Francs, French and Swiss, British pounds, German D-marks, Dutch guilders, and Danish kroner were disbursed in vast quantities to purchase yen, whose relative value, everyone in Tokyo was sure, could only appreciate, especially if the Europeans pegged their currencies to the dollar.
Equities were traded off in Europe as well, with the local currencies converted to yen.
The expectation again was that when the American collapse resumed, the European currencies would fall, and with them the values of stock issues.