Word of the Day
YEN (yen)
1. A strong desire or inclination
2. A basic unit of currency in Japan
Common clues: Longing; Hankering, It's tender to the Japanese; Itch: Japanese capital
Crossword puzzle frequency: 6 times a year
Frequency in English language: 10966 / 86800
Video: A Fistful of Yen
God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health care debate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.
- Anna Quindlen, The New York Times, sect. 1, p. 21 (May 14, 1994).
Yen is the currency used in Japan. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the United States Dollar and Euro. In Japanese it is usually pronounced "en", but the pronunciation "yen" is standard in English.
Japanese
10 yen coin (obverse) showing Byodoin Phoenix Hall
The yen was introduced by the Meiji government (Meiji 4) as a system resembling those in Europe; yen replaced the overly complex monetary system of the Edo Period. The New Currency Act of 1871 stipulated the adoption of the decimal accounting system of yen, and rin, with the coins being round and cast as in the West. (The sen and the rin were eventually taken out of circulation in 1954.) While not a unit of official currency, for large quantities of yen the abbreviation man (which means "ten thousand") is used, in the same way as values in the United States are often quoted or rounded off to thousands (given the yen's smaller value, it is much more common). The yen was legally defined as 0.8667 troy ounces (26.956 g) of silver, a definition that is still legally enforceable today. The Act also moved Japan onto the Gold Standard.
Yen literally means a "round object" in Japanese, as the Yuan in Chinese.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Yen".
|
|
