what does this meen?

[ant]

thank you much all! also does every coin have an r rating? and is overton just for halves?

[Bruceswar]

Usally it is only asscoiated with early US coins. It can be any type.

[TomB]

R stands for "rarity" or "rarity rating" and the Overton system is only used for Flowing Hair, Draped Bust and Capped Bust half dollars from 1794-1836, inclusive. Winston is correct that there are only eight R values for this series and he has them listed in a previous post. Each die marriage (pairing of obverse die with reverse die) receives its own R rating and in a year such as 1832 there are many die pairings, which makes collecting pressure on individual die pairs weaker than if there were only one or two known die pairs for a date.

[Bruceswar]

Tom Lets not forget that there are other series collected by die marriages, but they do not use the Overton numbers. I would still think people would use the Rarity system, along with the cohen number or Sheldon number.

[TomB]

Yes, this is true. However, you must remember the context of the question and conversation was entirely devoted to early half dollars as well as the fact that there is no fully accepted rarity scale within numismatics. Therefore, each rarity system that uses R, or some derivation, for its terminology may mean something entirely different.

[jtryka]

Tom is correct, as Akers uses a rarity scale for 20th century gold that only goes to R-7 I believe. Most of the systems used however do have the most common at the lower numbers (R1) and the rarest at the higher numbers (R-7, R-8 or R-10).

[WinstonWare]

Tom is correct

[Conder101]

Most series use the Sheldon Rarity scale,or a modified Sheldon scale with slightly different specimen counts for the different levels. There are a couple of series that use a 1 - 10 scale such as the Civil War Tokens and Coal Scrip. Then there are a couple that use the open ended URS or Universal Rarity Scale (0 - ?). An example of this are the Cherrypickers Guide varieties.

 

The URS is supposed to be so wonderful because it can be used for any series whether it has low mintage or very high mintages. The URS has the rarest coins given the lowest numbers with the specimen count rising by powers of three for each subsequent level. No matter how high the mintage it can be assigned a URS number. Descriptions of the system show examples up to URS-22 or higher. The problem is there is really no reason to use numbers past URS-8 or 9. Anything beyond that is ridiculous. A URS-9 coin has up to 19,683 specimens, a URS-10 is 60,000. The problem is that there is no way you can realistically get anywhere near an accurate estimate of surviving specimens for coins with higher numbers than URS-7 or 8 2,187 or 6,561 specimens. This means that there are really only about 8 usable numbers, the same as with the Sheldon system, and unlike all the other common systems, the number order is reversed.