Silver is a precious metal that ranks amongst the most tradable commodities across the world. It has a long history of use merely as a commodity and notably as a commodity money. For centuries, silver has been used as a medium of exchange, store of value, and a unit of account, perfectly meeting all the criteria for a proper money. As a commodity, silver was assigned a unique symbol, ‘XAG’, while traded against commodities and currencies.

‘XAG’ is a three-letter code used worldwide to symbolize silver as a commodity (in the same way other commodities (e.g., gold: XAU) or currencies (e.g., USD, EUR, etc) are codified. The symbol is primarily used by international financial markets and exchanges to identify and trade silver, very much similar to other commodities such as oil and wheat.

The XAG symbol implies the spot price of silver, or the value of contact in which silver is used as underlying (e.g., silver futures). The XAG code also appears on financial instruments such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) whereby investors and other market participants can have exposure to, or take a position in, silver (particularly, price movement).

The code ‘XAG’ is derived from the periodic table of elements, which is a tabular order of chemical elements based on certain features: atomic number, electron configurations, and chemical properties. In the periodic table, each element is assigned a unique letter-based symbol. In this table, the symbol for gold is ‘Ag’, which is originally taken from the Latin word ‘argentum’, meaning ‘white or shining’, as the ancient used to describe silver.

The code ‘XAG’ is a combination of the symbol ‘Ag’ and ‘X’ for index (or exchange rate). This combination (X and Ag) produced the abbreviation ‘XAG’ as a universal symbol for silver as a commodity in the global financial markets.