Emmental, a hard Swiss cheese riddled with more holes than a phony alibi, has a name closely related to the word dollar. What connects the two words is the German word taler, meaning valley, a word that long ago joined up with the personal name Emme to form Emmentaler, meaning Emme’s valley. It was in this Swiss valley, not far from Bern, that the cheese was first produced, thus inspiring its original name, Emmentaler, later shortened to just Emmental. In Czechoslovakia, the German taler likewise joined up with the personal name Joachim to form Joachimstaler—that is, Joachim’s valley, the name of a valley where silver has been mined since the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century, a large coin minted from the silver these mines produced was named, after the valley, the Joachimstaler, a name that in High German was later shortened to just taler. In Low German, taler became doler, which English adopted in the mid sixteenth century to refer to the famous German coin. Near the end of the eighteenth century, about a decade after the American Revolution, doler—which by then had been respelt as dollar—was also adopted by the United States as the official name of their currency, the intent being to distinguish their monetary system from that of England. In time, other new countries also adopted the dollar as their monetary unit: Canada in 1858, Australia in 1966, and New Zealand in 1967.