Quarter (Canadian coin)

The quarter is a Canadian coin, valued at 25 cents or one-fourth of a Canadian dollar. It is a small, circular coin of silver colour. According to the Royal Canadian Mint, the official name for the coin is the 25 cent coin, but in practice the term quarter is universal.

In Canadian French, the quarter is commonly (and counter-intuitively) called a trente sous (a "thirty cents"). This is because the sou originally referred to a monetary unit used in France (and also New France), whereas today in Canadian French it means a Canadian cent, and somewhere in history 120 sous of New France came to be worth the equivalent of what eventually became the Canadian dollar. The exact exchange-rate mechanism by which this came to be is the subject of various occasionally contradictory theories. [1] [2]

This coin has the most commonly altered reverse in Canada, being the usual venue for commemorative issues. These include:

• 1967: Canadian centennial; all coins had unique reverses, 25 cent had a bobcat
• 1973: Centennial of the RCMP, depicting a mounted RCMP officer
• 1992: 125th anniversary of Confederation; 12 obverses, one for each province and territory
• 1999: Millennium series; monthly issues (named by month), each with a theme from the previous millennium
• 2000: Millennium series continued; monthly themed issues (named by theme) for the coming millennium
• 2004: Acadia issue; a 17th century sailing ship and the dates 1604-2004
• 2004: Colorized poppy image for Remembrance Day
• 2005: (forthcoming) Alberta centennial, Saskatchewan centennial