I know enamel7 is one of the in-house "experts", but the term floating mint mark has been used for decades. Many older U.S. catalogs, which I no longer have, listed floating mint marks. Back then they had a small premium. I did not imply that there was additional value to the placement of mint letters on United States issues at the present time, but they are an inexpensive way to collect, and an excellent exercise for looking for modern coin varieties. Almost all the videos I have seen lately about coins stress values. "What's it worth", is always a popular question by collectors and non-collectors alike. it is true that collectors seldom place an additional value on mint mark location. Floating mint mark does NOT refer to a mint letter changing position on a single die while in use. There will usually be several die pairs used for any production run. Supposedly the mint letter is punched in the master dies now to insure consistency, but until a few years ago, the mint employees finished the working dies by adding the mint letter by hand which resulted in the mint letters appearing in slightly different positions sometimes. In fact, Q. David Bowers has offered a standing $1000 reward for a wildly placed Denver mint marked
nickel. I believe I saw reference to that offered by a TreasureNet member last year. I will try to find the post. You will get nay-sayers through out your life, and in almost all cases the negative comments come from someone who is not in the least bit interested in the topic. It is kind of a form of bullying. You keen-eyed T-Netters, whether you collect coins or not, can look at your small change accumulations and eventually find coins of the same date with widely varying placements of the mint letter. For us it is almost exclusively the "D" for Denver mint letter. That's another now widely accepted term. Actually, the "D" is a mint letter, not a mint mark. A mint mark meant something else at one time, referring to code symbols or initials in the early days of minting coinage. Hardly anyone has access to those interesting and scarce coins, so now we call mint letters mint marks. And it's O.K., it is accepted, everyone calls them mint marks, and we all know what that means. That is how language develops and evolves over time.