Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In China, Malacca, Burma, and Siam, a dollar bearing an impressed private mark as a guaranty of genuineness.
- Having the appearance of a dollar covered with chops or marks: applied to the face when deeply pitted with smallpox.
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Gammerstang commented on the word chop-dollar
(noun) - A dollar, chopped or stamped with a private mark as a guarantee of its genuineness. Dollars similarly marked had currency in England in the first quarter of the last 18th century, and one of the present writers can recollect this occasional occurrence in Scotland in his childhood. The word chap is adopted in Malay with meanings of self-impression, stamp (to seal or stamp) though there is, as Mr. Walter Skeat points out, a pure native word tera, or tra, and chop has acquired the specific sense of a passport or license.
--Col. Henry Yule's Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words, 1886
January 19, 2018