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A small letter or emblem saying which mint struck the coin.
Also known as: Mintmark, Small letter on a coin, Letter under the date on a coin
One or two characters, usually tucked below the design. It identifies the striking facility and, with the date, places a coin precisely — which is the whole reason collectors care and is also all the symbol actually says.
A small letter, monogram or emblem struck into a coin to identify the mint that produced it.
Contexts: History
Introduced so that a defective or underweight coin could be traced to the facility that made it. Accountability, not decoration, and the reason mint marks predate collecting by nearly two thousand years.
American practice marks most coins — D for Denver, S for San Francisco, and an absence of any mark for Philadelphia on most issues. Modern British circulating coins carry no mint mark at all, because effectively all of them come from one mint.
No mark is itself information, and what it means differs by country.
United States and United Kingdom
It identifies and dates a coin. It does not value one: scarcity depends on how many were struck and how many survive, which is a fact about production runs rather than about the mark.
Almost all writing about mint marks is about price. The mark itself says where, not what it is worth.
A single small raised letter or short monogram, set apart from the main legend, usually below the design or beside the date.
The mint mark is one of the marks on a coin.
Both are small marks identifying which official facility handled an object.