Word.ws English Dictionary

hacksilver

hacksilver noun: silver objects that have been cut up or otherwise defaced and circulated as currency, especially in archaeological contexts.

Noun

hacksilver (uncountable)

  1. (historical, usually) Silver objects that have been cut up or otherwise defaced and circulated as currency, especially in archaeological contexts.
    • Tenth-century hoards still consist mainly of coins from Central Asia, but with variable amounts of hacksilver. The latter consists of whole and cut coins, whole and broken ornaments and ingots (both of bar form and flat 'spills' of molten metal).2001, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe
    • The non-numismatic elements of Class 4 and 5 hoards, which for the purposes of this paper are dealt with together, comprise, respectively, finds containing hacksilver with complete ingots and/or ornaments and finds consisting exclusively of hacksilver.2004, John Hines, editor, Land, Sea and Home: Proceedings of a Conference on Viking-period Settlement, at Cardiff, July 2001, page 186

Forms of hacksilver

alternative formhacksilber

Origin of hacksilver

Partial calque of German Hacksilber.

Questions about hacksilver

What does hacksilver mean?
Hacksilver means silver objects that have been cut up or otherwise defaced and circulated as currency, especially in archaeological contexts.
What part of speech is hacksilver?
Hacksilver is a noun.

Words near hacksilver in the dictionary

  1. hacksawed
  2. hacksawing
  3. hacksawn
  4. hacksaws
  5. hacksilber
  6. hacksilver
  7. hackspace
  8. hackspaces
  9. hackster
  10. hacksters
  11. hackstress

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hacksilver (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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