Where does the phrase, "to stop on a dime" come from? [duplicate]
I believe this came from horse-riding. At least the earliest reference I can find suggests that stopping or turning on a small coin is likely to be from that source.
He was such a clever horse , too: some. could turn on a sixpence as the saying was
All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal - Volume 71 - 1892 - Edited by Charles Dickens
The extraordinary feature of this, in my mind, is that the text goes on to talk about cactus. We don't have naturally-growing cactus in Britain so presumably the action takes place in America. Yet the term is still "sixpence" which was a British coin.