Sean from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, is an editor who reads lots of fiction from the 1930s, in which he often runs into the words spondulix and simoleons, meaning “a large amount of money.” They’re both Americanisms. Spondulix, also spelled spondulicks or spondulux, may derive from the Greek word spondylos, meaning “vertebra” or “spine,” suggesting the similarity between a column of those bones and coined stacked for counting. Simoleon is more of a mystery, although some have suggested a link with semolina flour, given that there’s a long list of food names that are used as slang for “money,” including cabbage, cheddar, chicken feed, peanuts, and coliander, a variant of coriander. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Spondulix, Simoleons, and Other Words for Money”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Sean Garrett from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Hi, Sean. Welcome.
Hi, how are you?
What’s on your mind?
I’m an editor and I read a lot of short fiction.
And I would occasionally run into two words that I know almost certainly are slang terms.
One fairly commonly, the other not so commonly.
And they’re both words for large amounts of money.
The one is simoleons, and the other is spondulics.
Simoleons I’ve heard fairly commonly.
Spondulics I’ve only run into in, say, European.
Like, I was reading a collection of stories by Bertolt Brecht at one point,
And they used spondulics.
It sounds like a Dutch word or something,
But I was just wondering if you know those words
And if you would know what the origins of them are.
They’re both Americanisms. Spondylox, yeah, isn’t Dutch, but it possibly has a Greek origin because there was a type of shell used as money.
And also the spondylo root refers to the spine or vertebrae.
And there’s one citation found by Douglas Wilson, who’s a language researcher, in a book.
And it has spondulux defined as coin piled for counting.
So if you can imagine a stack of coins looking like a stack of vertebrae, so that’s possibly the origin.
It goes back to about 1847.
Yeah, and simoleons are a little harder to pin down.
There’s so many stories about this, Martha, aren’t there?
There’s so many stories about what simoleon might come from.
It always makes me think of semolina.
You know, that’s the only word it sounds close to.
Oh, you’re on it.
Sean, that’s bingo.
That’s my favorite theory.
The hard, rough wheat grinding is kind of used for pasta and soups
Because there is a long history of English for using food words to mean money.
Cabbage and cheddar and chickafeed and peanuts and coriander seeds,
Which was an obsolete word for coriander.
And semolina looks kind of like coriander seeds.
I could totally see semolina being used in a modified form to mean money,
Particularly because there’s something like 16 different spellings of the word.
None of them exactly like semolina, unfortunately.
Another one is possibly related to a British sixpence coin known as a simon
That jumped to the United States.
And another one is maybe it was related to the word simony,
Which is about the buying or selling of church pardons or appointments,
Maybe mixed with the word Napoleon.
Who knows?
One really interesting side note that I just have to bring up
Is the first several uses of the term that we know of simolean imprint,
The first three or four, are all from the same magazine.
It’s the American satirical publication Puck,
Which was widely reprinted across the United States.
And they’re all written in mock biblical prose.
Just kind of like this fake kind of almost, you know, King James kind of writer.
Highfalutin.
And so I think, and they all sound like the same writer.
So I think one person coined this word, published it in pocket,
It was reprinted everywhere else, and that is the source of the word.
I think maybe they were trying to make up a currency name that sounded biblical.
And yet was funny, since Puck was the humor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, slightly humorous, because simolean sounds vaguely.
Yeah, there’s something automatically kind of like, you don’t take it seriously, right?
Well, I got to tell you, Sean, it was a delight to talk to you about these terms.
You don’t often get a chance to flex my slang muscles, so I appreciate the call.
Excellent.
And, yeah, maybe I’ll call back with a few more if I go check my notes.
That’d be great.
All right.
Be well.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
We’re always interested in the words and phrases that catch your eye when you’re doing your
Reading, fiction from the 1920s or online.
So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.
That address is words@waywordradio.org.
