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I'm not finding aany substantiation of that. The coin was actually 8 reals, not 1 real as I'd indicated above. Also known as a peso or Spanish dollar.

Peso: "a weight" https://www.etymonline.com/word/peso




You are right. "pieces of eight" seems to come from the phrase pieces of eight reals, with the real being the Spanish unit of silver money. Although I would guess and this site states that they did get cut up from time to time to make change[1].

[1]https://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume3...




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