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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Kasia, post: 2364077, member: 31533&quot;]To better understand the what a die chip is might be to simply give a few analogies (although I will follow precede and follow this with more numismatically related references). </p><p><br /></p><p>A die chip is simply a small &#039;interior&#039; (meaning it does not involve the edge or outside portion of a coin&#039;s face) die break. You can think of it in one of these:</p><p><br /></p><p>1) You see a canine and you call it a dog. Yes it is a dog, but then you either notice that it is still young, and not full grown or someone tells you that the dog is only 4 months old. You then call it a puppy. Why? Because there is a better term (&quot;puppy&quot;) to convey to others what is. Is it still a dog or member of the dog family? Yes, but others who know it is a puppy who still see you calling it a dog (if you didn&#039;t know) when told it is a puppy, will not understand why you would refuse to refer to it as a puppy and then correct someone who tells you it is a puppy, essentially, that no, it&#039;s not a puppy, it&#039;s a dog. Same thing happens with other baby animals, like the difference between cats and kittens. But in animals, it comes not just with possibly a smaller size, but with a presumed age (young in growth, which will then lead to being full-grown). Animals, in this sense, tend to be called either a puppy/kitten or dog/cat, there aren&#039;t really any unique names we call the intermediate stages.</p><p><br /></p><p>2) If you talk to parents (of humans, because some people think of their pets as their children) and inquire about their kids (i.e. , in keeping with the above analogy with dogs/cats, these are &quot;humans&quot;), you may be confronted with one or both either getting very specific or correcting you for thinking they were older children by referring to one (or more) of their children as babies, infants, or by age, as in &quot;my 16-month old&quot;, for example. With this, as with dogs and cats (puppies and kittens), the person is providing more specificity and also telling you that the child has a category that is more definitive (think more specific) than a non-definitive category. Also, it is indicating the child is not full grown, meaning not an adult. Yet they are still &#039;human&#039;. No one would be using the term &#039;human&#039; in reference this way, yet they still can classified as human. In other words, a human may be an infant, or a baby, or an adolescent, or an adult; yet once identified as one of those, it cannot at the same time (usually, although baby and infant sometimes overlap) be a person in the other category. </p><p><br /></p><p>So 1) and 2) are analogies that include the younger/smaller version being identified by unique identifiers that tell about age or size. (If you want to distinguish one thing or another just by size, compare either of the words cottage or bungalow to the word house. Both cottages and bungalows are houses, but they are distinguished primarily by their size: they are small houses).</p><p><br /></p><p>3) Now an analogy where calling something by a more general name is absolutely wrong: Say you see a wolf, and you say, hey, that is a pretty neat looking dog. But even though a wolf is in the general dog category (instead of being a cat or human), people generally don&#039;t go around naming that animal as a dog. They call it a wolf or a wolf pup (young). This distinguishes and more specifically identifies what this is.</p><p><br /></p><p>So... the third is one where even if you call it in it&#039;s correct category, you are incorrect, and persisting to call it a dog basically persists in mis-identifying it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now for numismatics:</p><p><br /></p><p>One of the better resources would by anything written by Ken Potter. He&#039;s basically IMO one of the go-to men for knowledge on coin errors/varieties. Here is a quote from one of his articles: (from <a href="http://www.numismaticnews.net/article/die_breaks_on_p_and_d_arizona_quarters" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.numismaticnews.net/article/die_breaks_on_p_and_d_arizona_quarters" rel="nofollow">http://www.numismaticnews.net/article/die_breaks_on_p_and_d_arizona_quarters</a>) &quot;Die chips are the same as die breaks except that they are smaller.&quot; This is as basic as it gets. Yet it does distinguish (if size is known) whether the die defect is called a die break or a die chip. </p><p><br /></p><p>This quote, above, doesn&#039;t address what size the break on the die has to be and it doesn&#039;t go into all the nuances that go with broken dies and the state they are in, start at (as far as breaking), or the progression of the break. It simply identifies, much like a puppy is a small dog and a kitten is a small cat, that a small die break is a die chip if not something else (meaning, this identifies a small die break as a die chip, yet does not say that just because the die break is small it can&#039;t be something other than a die chip, like when it involves the edge it can then be a &#039;cud&#039; rather than a die chip. Die chips are not cuds and cuds are not die chips, although they both refer to die breaks.</p><p><br /></p><p>It also doesn&#039;t say what size that a die chip can be before it is no longer a die chip, but a die break (or major die break if you will). But other sites I have seen is that if the extruded metal from the break is a blob that is less than 1 sq mm in size, it is definitely a die chip, and if it is more than 4 sq mm in size, it is definitely not a die chip, but will be referred to as a die break. The size of it between 1 and 4 sq mm would be somewhat of a grey area, meaning there is some sizes of blobs that could be referred to either way, though many do use the approx. 4 sq. mm to fully distinguish it as not a die chip.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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