Silver as money
The metal most ordinary transactions actually used.
Gold gets the attention, but for most of monetary history silver did the everyday work. Gold was too valuable for small transactions, a coin worth a week's wages is useless for buying bread. Silver sat at the right value per unit weight for daily commerce, and most historic currencies were silver-based in practice even when gold anchored the system on paper.
The linguistic trace is still visible. The French argent means both "silver" and "money". The rupee, the rouble and the Spanish dollar all began as silver coins.
Silver standards and bimetallism
Many countries operated a silver standard, or a bimetallic one in which both metals were legal tender at a fixed official ratio. Bimetallism had a persistent flaw: when the market ratio between the metals drifted away from the official ratio, the undervalued metal was pulled out of circulation and hoarded or melted, leaving only the overvalued one in use. Through the late nineteenth century most countries abandoned silver for gold.
Why silver left your pocket
Circulating coins contained real silver well into the twentieth century. They stopped because the metal became worth more than the coin's face value, at which point the rational act is to melt the coin, and coins begin vanishing from circulation.
Governments responded by debasing the alloy and then removing silver entirely. The United States took silver out of most circulating coinage from 1965; the United Kingdom had already cut its silver content in 1920 and again in 1947. Modern coins are base metal, and their face value has no relationship to their material worth.
Silver now
Silver remains a traded commodity with significant industrial demand, and is minted into bullion and collector coins that carry a nominal face value but trade on metal content. No circulating currency is redeemable for it.