Well, in looking through my site statistics, I found that someone had reached this page by looking for “how many ripples on a dime.” Having been moderately interested in coins for a while (and I still am, to some extent), I thought I was in a good position to answer this one, although the chances of the same person coming back to look again are infinitesimally small (yes, I had to look that word up to know how to spell it properly).
The ridges around the edges of the dime, quarter, and half-dollar are know as ‘reeding’ or ‘milling.’ According to PBS’s website, there are 118 separate ridges on the dime. It took a little more work to find the information on the quarter, but according to this site, the number is only one more than the dime, with 119.
The next trivia questions from this would be, “Who bothered to count all of them? And what is it about human beings that makes us ask such weird questions?”
I don’t have answers to either question.