Learn English – When did “a buck” start being used to mean any unit of 100? (E.g. “a buck fifty” for 150 lbs.)

american-englishnumbersslang

Before you answer, please note: I'm only interested in when this usage was established in common (American) parlance. I know what the term means and I don't need it defined, nor do I require an etymology as to its origins.

That said, most of us probably already know that "a buck" in AmE is a slang expression referring to a dollar. As Etymonline notes:

buck (n.2)
"dollar," 1856, American English, perhaps an abbreviation of buckskin as a unit of trade among Indians and Europeans in frontier days (attested from 1748).

But for most of my life I've been aware that "buck" can be used broadly in the sense of 100 of something, especially when that something involves weight and money.

He goes about a buck forty sopping wet. (Meaning: He weighs about 140 pounds at his heaviest.)

She says she's making a buck eighty in her new job. (Meaning: She says her salary is $180,000 a year in her new job.)

Note, however, that we never hear multiples of this, like "four bucks" to mean 400. And the usage always seems to involve a number between 100 and 200: "a buck fifty" and so forth (the term seems to be wedded to the indefinite article: "a buck something").

It's obvious where the 100 comes from: a dollar represents 100 cents. I'm just wondering when this particular usage crept into the lexicon.

Addendum

This question on EL&U demonstrates that responses involving "I've never heard that usage before" may mean this could be a regional usage, but not a non-existent one.

Azor Ahai adds this corroboration:

He cites Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, as an example: “He looks massive when he’s walking out of the water in the beach, but he’s just shredded,” he says, guessing the actor is “a buck 70,” or 170 pounds in gymspeak.
(Vanity Fair)

Full disclosure

I know this must date from at least the early '70s because of the following:

In my first job out of college (1974) my boss used to corrupt this usage in what he thought was a humorous way. For example, "We were going down the Dan Ryan at 3:00 a.m., must've been doing a buck two-eighty." I remember it because it used to annoy the hell out of me that he wouldn't give a "real" number in that context. I conclude from this that if the usage could be teased and played with at this point, it must have been extant for some time.

Best Answer

1971 - Non-Money Related

Sorry, @Mary-LouA, but I've got one from a year before your 1972 citation, and it's not monetary. This also fits with the OP's 1974 recollections involving speed and its measurement.

Here's an example of someone using "a buck" to mean 100 miles per hour. It's from May or June 1971. The reference is the Arlington High School Yearbook, 1971. Specifically, it's from one of the "self-blurbs" that kids are allowed to put in the margins. There is the girl's name, her address, (I assume) her birth date, and then her note,

NOREEN PAICE, 52 Aberdeen Rd. 10/14/53 Hate matrons [;] happiness is doing a buck ten on Jimmy's CH

"CH" refers to a motorcycle, such as this 1959 Harley Davidson Sportster CH Motorcycle. The best "expansion" of the initialism that I could find was from this Quora post, where Dave Butler gives,

C - Competition. The idea was this bike could be ridden off the road, onto a dirt track, and race. I’d be interested to know [how] that went.
H - High performance.
I’ve heard it said the C means California, and the H means Hot. I’m not a believer.

On the same thread, Marc Whinery says,

CH=kick start

but I'm not as impressed with his supporting arguments.

We can drive our "first earlier known appearance" date (for non-monetary use) back to 5 September 1985 with another baseball reference, @called2voyage. The article is in the San Bernadino Sun (p.34), the article is titled Downing drives Angels past Tigers, and the quote is,

"The stat sheets (which showed him hitting .362 in his last 33 games) are a little misleading," Downing said. "The last two weeks I've only been hitting about .150.

"Actually, when Detroit was in our place (late last month) they kind of cooled me off. The Tigers have kind of cooled me all season, to tell the truth. I'm only hitting about a buck (.100) against them, so it was especially nice to break out of it here."

Here is some data-driven analysis from Google Ngrams.

At this link you'll find a graph showing the usage, as found in Google Books, of the following:

a buck twenty
a buck thirty
a buck forty
a buck fifty
a buck sixty
a buck seventy
a buck eighty
a buck ninety

The first monetary usage from this corpus was from 1922:

The Emerald of Sigma Pi - Volume 8, Issue 4 - Page 248

1922 - ‎Read - ‎More editions Dear Brother Barr: Enclosed you will find a check for the necessary $1.50, for which please insure me against losing track of all the latest dope on old Sigma Pi for another year. Believe me, if a buck fifty ever slid out of jeans as willingly as this I ...

This isn't the question, though it does show how we can get an answer to this question and see trends. It doesn't catch the usages in 1748 or 1856 noted by the OP, but it's a start.

I must note that literary usage tags behind colloquial usage, most likely more so in 1922 than in the 1990s.

I further narrowed it down with such things as "weighed a buck {-ty}", "went a buck {-ty}" and other similar prepended words. To start, I didn't add the number represented by {-ty}.

The full list of what I tried is below. I think that the most interesting chart, and the one that shows the best usage over time as well as possible starting date, is for "about a buck fifty". Without any rigorous analysis, it looks like the date we're looking for is sometime in the 1970s.

"about"; "weigh", "weighs", "weighed", "weighing", "go", "goes", "went", "going" "do", "does", "did", "doing", "drive", "drives", "drove", "driving", "hit", "hits", "hitting", "bowl", "bowls", "bowled", "bowling", "than", "at least"

P.S. Here is the most interesting usage I found.

Locked Up but Not Locked Down: A Guide to Surviving the American [Prison System]

Ahmariah Jackson, ‎IAtomic Seven, ‎Supreme Understanding - 2011 - ‎Preview

Catching a Buck 50: A “rip” or “Buck 50” is when you get your face slashed by a razor and your cheek opens up like you've got a second mouth. The name “buck fifty” came from the number of stitches usually required for such a wound (150).

The same usage appears in this book, as well as this other one. In the latter, it's used in a poem,

...
And shorties with quick tongues
Who threw disses or spit blades
That left a crescent across your face.
A Buck 50
Taped Up
Shaped up
...

-Patty Dukes

Note the capitalization in "A Buck 50".

This more contemporary (early 21st century) usage is further expounded by user isaiahrobinson on this StraightDope thread:

In West Coast gang culture putting "a buck fifty" across someone's face means cutting them right down across the face with a razor, often from the ear to the corner of the mounth, leaving a scar. The guy who plays Omar Little in [T]he Wire, Michael K. Williams, has a buck fifty scar across his face as shown in this photo. I don't know if that usage is even remotely relevant but I thought I'd mention it...

The link is dead, but I found this picture of Michael K. Williams on a page about celebrity scars.

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