Sterling and Antique Silver

Sterling, coin, plate, and fine silver

Sterling silver is an alloy that is 92.5% pure silver, with the remaining 7.5% typically copper added for strength, since pure silver on its own is too soft to hold its shape in flatware, holloware, or jewelry that gets handled. Fine silver, sometimes called pure silver, runs 99.9% or better and shows up more in bullion and some art silver than in everyday tableware. Coin silver is an older American standard, roughly 90% silver, that was common before sterling became the dominant standard in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Silverplate is a different thing entirely: a base metal, often nickel silver or a copper alloy, with a thin layer of silver bonded to the surface. A plated piece can look identical to solid silver at a glance, and only the marks, and sometimes a worn spot where the plating has thinned to base metal, tell the two apart. Confusing plate for solid silver is one of the most common mistakes people make with inherited silver, and it changes both what a piece is worth by weight and how it should be cleaned.

Why marks and weight both matter

A mark tells you what a maker or an assay office claimed about a piece at the time it was made: the standard of purity, and often who made it and where. Weight tells you what is actually there, measured in troy ounces, the unit used for precious metals rather than the ounces on a kitchen scale. Neither one alone settles much on its own. A piece can be correctly marked sterling and still be light for its size if it was cast thin, and a heavy piece can carry a mark that is worn or missing entirely.

Together, the mark and the weight are the starting point for most of the questions people bring to a piece of silver: is this really sterling, is it worth more than its melt value, and is it part of a larger set worth keeping intact. Reading marks reliably takes some practice and a good reference, and figuring out value from weight and pattern is a different, separate kind of homework. This guide keeps the two apart rather than folding them into one another.

Learning to read the marks

Marking systems differ by country and by period, and no single chart from memory covers all of them reliably. British silver typically carries a small group of marks struck together: a standard mark, an assay office town mark, a date letter, and a maker's mark, sometimes with a duty mark from certain periods. American silver is usually simpler on its face, most often stamped STERLING or 925, though older American coin silver may carry only a maker's name or initials and no standard mark at all. The hallmarks page walks through how these systems work and how to look up the specifics for a given mark rather than guessing at them.

What flatware and holloware are worth

Once a piece is confirmed as sterling or coin silver, its value depends on more than the metal in it. Pattern, maker, condition, monograms, and whether a set is complete all move the number, sometimes by a wide margin over what the same weight would bring melted down. The flatware and holloware page works through how those factors are weighed and how to use a current spot price as a starting point rather than an answer.

Silver sits between two collecting habits this site covers elsewhere. It changes hands in estates the same way furniture and jewelry do, and at the level of raw metal it is also a precious-metals question much like coins and currency, where standards, purity, and weight matter in nearly the same way. Anyone piecing together a fuller picture of a collection can start from the full range of subjects this guide covers and work outward from there.