How can I understand "thirty-seconds of a dollar"?

• Half a dollar = 50 cents
• A quarter of a dollar = 25 cents
• An eighth of a dollar = 12.5 cents
• A sixteenth of a dollar = 6.25 cents
• A thirty-second of a dollar = 3.125 cents

Stocks used to be traded in fractional parts of a dollar too, but changed to decimal pricing many years ago.

I think the phrase will be easier to understand if you break the sentence into two parts:

• Treasury bond prices in the United States are quoted in dollars.
• Treasury bond prices in the United States are also quoted in thirty-seconds of a dollar.

Now you can view "thirty-second of a dollar" as a new unit for quoting treasury bond prices. The usage of plural form "thirty-seconds" is the same as that of "dollars" in the first sentence above.

If the unit price were $0.25, it would be put into words as quarters of a dollar (or quarters, in normal speech). If it were $0.20, it would be fifths of a dollar. Following this pattern, thirty-seconds of a dollar means "a unit price of $.03125". It sounds odd because only the US Treasury (as far as I know) uses this particular measurement.

I believe it is a fraction, e.g. 1/32. Though it sounds odd to me, imperial measurements do not always make sense. ;)