Silver

White, lustrous, and relatively abundant, silver has a myriad of uses from simple industrial right through to fine jewellery. Like pure gold, pure silver is a bit too soft for general jewellery purposes and is alloyed with copper to improve its strength. Unlike gold, only a handful alloys were ever widely used, with ‘sterling silver’ being the most popular. Sterling silver contains 92.5% pure silver and 7.5% copper and is stamped ‘925’. Other alloys that were common at one time or another are;
‘Continental silver’, used on the European continent mainly for tableware and at 80% silver content the lowest to still be considered silver, and;
‘Coin silver’, used, unsurprisingly, for coins and having 90% silver content.
An alloy containing 93.5% silver is often used today for its ease in casting, but is usually still stamped ‘925’ despite having a slightly higher silver content.