Article - Precious Metals - Silver

About Silver
Silver is a beautiful pliable precious metal. Did you ever wonder what Sterling Silver means or the stamp 925 you may have seen on jewelry or seen quoted in a description of a silver piece.

Well basically, only Silver of a certain quality or more accurately, purity, can be referred to as Sterling Silver. Only metal which is at least 92.5% pure Silver can be called Sterling Silver. So you can probably guess what the numbers 925 means, and is synonymous with the term Sterling Silver.

So, Sterling Silver (925) is 92.5% pure silver, but what about the rest of the metal? Well, because Silver is a pretty soft metal, the remaining 7.5% of the metal alloy is made with other ...


... metals which help to make the Silver firmer and more durable. This is usually Copper.
The 3 digit numbers often found to hallmark precious metal basically comes from a measurement of Millesimal fineness. This is a system of denoting the purity of platinum, gold and silver alloys by parts per thousand of pure metal by mass in the alloy. As in the example above, an alloy containing 92.5% Silver is denoted as "925", and is referred to as Sterling Silver.

Here is a list of other common figures for Millesimal fineness for Silver:

• 999.9 (Ultra-fine silver used by Royal Canadian Mint in the Canadian Silver Maple Leaf)
• 999 (Fine silver used in Good Delivery bullion bars, also known as three nines fine)
• 980 (common standard used in Mexico ca.1930 - 1945)
• 958 (equivalent to Britannia silver)
• 950 (equivalent to French 1st Standard)
• 925 (equivalent to Sterling silver)
• 900 (equivalent to Coin silver in the USA, also known as one nine fine)
• 833 (common standard used in continental silver especially among the Dutch, Swedish, and Germans)
• 830 (common standard used in older Scandinavian silver)
• 835 (a standard predominantly used in Germany after 1884)
• 800 (minimum standard for silver in Germany after 1884; Egyptian silver; Canadian silver circulating coinage)
• 750 (uncommon silver standard found in older German, Swiss and Austro-Hungarian silver)

Hope you found this useful.