Word.ws English Dictionary

wildcat money

wildcat money noun: a paper currency that was issued by banks in the 19th century when there was no federal regulation of banks.

Noun

wildcat money

  1. (historical) A paper currency that was issued by banks in the 19th century when there was no federal regulation of banks.
    • Heretofore, the end that should have been sought—a faultless medium of exchange—had been lost sight of; and every writer who has presented a new theory of money, not to mention the old one, has become entangled with the dogmas, State supervision, "measure of value," "standard of value," and legal...1895, Alfred B. Westrup, The New Philosophy of Money, page 8
    • Many of our "sound money" men, after the death of "free silver," follow after "assets banking," and try to delude themselves that they are not really harking back to the cult of that old money demon whose handiwork is "wildcat money," like that which some of our fathers still living knew and...1908, Wilbur Aldrich, Money and Credit, page 104

Synonyms of wildcat money

Questions about wildcat money

What does wildcat money mean?
Wildcat money means a paper currency that was issued by banks in the 19th century when there was no federal regulation of banks.
What part of speech is wildcat money?
Wildcat money is a noun.

Words near wildcat money in the dictionary

  1. wildcat banks
  2. wildcat cartridge
  3. wildcat cartridges
  4. wildcat currencies
  5. wildcat currency
  6. wildcat money
  7. wildcat note
  8. wildcat notes
  9. wildcat sandwich
  10. wildcat sandwiches
  11. wildcat strike

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wildcat money (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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