Silver hallmarks explained: 925, 830, three towers and three crowns

925 means sterling silver and it is the mark you will see most often. 830, 800 and 835 are genuine silver too, just at lower continental standards. EPNS, nickel silver and alpaca contain no silver at all. Everything else is detail, and the detail is where the interesting pieces hide.

Purity marks first

Silver is too soft to use pure, so it is alloyed, usually with copper. The number tells you parts of silver per thousand.

• 999: fine silver. Rare in jewelry, used for bullion and some modern work.
• 958: Britannia standard. A British mark, used 1697 to 1720 by law and occasionally since.
• 925: sterling. The international standard and the one to expect.
• 900: coin silver. Common on American pieces made before around 1870, made from melted coinage.
• 875, 835, 830, 800: continental standards. Widespread in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and eastern Europe.

A piece marked 830 is real silver. It has slightly less silver in it than sterling, which affects scrap value a little, and it makes no difference at all to whether the piece is worth collecting.

The marks that mean no silver

These turn up constantly and they trip people up because several of them contain the word silver.

• EPNS: electroplated nickel silver. A thin silver plating over a nickel alloy.
• Nickel silver, German silver, alpaca, alpacca: copper, nickel and zinc. No silver.
• A1, EP, EPBM: plating grades and electroplated britannia metal.
• Silver tone, silver plated, SP: exactly what they say.

If a piece carries one of these and a seller has listed it as silver, that is worth a question. It is more often carelessness than dishonesty, but the price should reflect the metal.

British marks are a complete record

Britain runs the most informative hallmarking system in the world, and a full set of British marks will tell you the metal, the maker, the town and the exact year.

You are looking for four symbols in a row, sometimes five.

1. The sponsor's mark: the maker's or importer's initials in a shaped shield.
2. The standard mark: a lion passant, a walking lion in profile, means sterling. A seated Britannia figure means the 958 standard.
3. The assay office mark: a leopard's head for London, an anchor for Birmingham, a crown historically for Sheffield, a castle for Edinburgh.
4. The date letter: a single letter in a shaped shield. The letter, the typeface and the shield shape together give one specific year.
5. Sometimes a duty mark, a sovereign's head, used 1784 to 1890 to show tax had been paid.

Date letters run in cycles, so the letter alone is not enough. You need the letter, the font and the shield outline together, and a reference chart for the office in question. Once you have it, you have the year the metal was assayed, which is usually the year it was made.

Danish and Swedish marks

Scandinavian silver is worth knowing properly, because a lot of it is very good and it is regularly misidentified.

Denmark. The Copenhagen town mark is three towers, shown with a year beneath it on assayed pieces. Danish silver is often 830 rather than 925, and you will see it stamped as 830S, where the S simply stands for silver. Georg Jensen, easily the best known Danish maker, used a series of marks that changed over the decades, which is how his work is dated. Assay master marks appear alongside the town mark on older pieces.

Sweden. The Swedish national silver mark is three crowns, struck inside a three lobed outline the Swedes call the kattfot, the cat's foot. That surround is the thing people misremember as a cat: the Stockholm town mark itself is the crowned head of Saint Erik. Alongside those you will find a maker's mark and a date letter, and the same three crowns in an oval mean the piece was imported into Sweden rather than made there.

Three towers is Danish, three crowns is Swedish. They are easy to mix up in a worn stamp, and the difference matters for both attribution and price.

Continental marks more generally

Beyond Britain and Scandinavia, most countries mark purity and maker but not year, so you date the piece from its style and construction instead. A few useful signposts:

• France used a series of small figural marks: a boar's head and a crab for the 800 standard on small work, Minerva's head for higher standards.
• Germany used a crescent moon and crown alongside a numeric purity mark from 1888.
• Russia used a numeric zolotnik standard before 1927, where 84 zolotniks corresponds to about 875 parts per thousand, alongside a kokoshnik head mark.
• The Netherlands used a lion and a sword figure among others.

If a mark looks like a picture rather than a number, it is almost certainly continental and worth photographing and looking up rather than guessing.

American marks

American silver rarely carries a date. Instead you get the word STERLING spelled out, or 925, plus a maker's mark. Before roughly 1870, coin silver at 900 was the norm and is often marked COIN, DOLLAR or PURE COIN, or not marked at all.

Trademark registration started in 1905, so a registered mark places a piece after that date. Big names like Tiffany, Gorham and Unger Brothers all used identifiable maker's marks that reference books can date within a decade or two.

How to read a worn mark

Most marks on jewelry are two or three millimetres across and half worn away.

• Photograph it rather than squinting. Use a phone macro mode, get the light coming across the mark at a low angle rather than straight at it, and zoom into the photograph afterwards. This is the single most useful trick.
• Look in the right places. On rings, inside the shank. On chains and bracelets, the clasp or the tag next to it. On brooches, the back plate or the pin stem. On pendants, the bail.
• Do not polish the mark to see it better. Polishing compounds round off the edges of the stamp and can erase a shallow date letter permanently.
• Expect more than one mark. A full set is often spread around a piece, not stamped in a neat line.

Tarnish, cleaning and what not to do

Silver tarnishes. That is normal chemistry, not damage, and a tarnished piece is not a fake.

What matters is what you do about it. Dip cleaners strip tarnish fast, and they also strip the darkened recesses that give a pattern its depth, leaving the piece flat and lifeless. On antique silver that is a permanent loss of value. Use a soft cloth and a gentle silver polish, work with the piece rather than at it, and leave the shadows in the low points alone.

Never put silver with foiled or closed back stones in water, and never use an ultrasonic cleaner on a piece with soft or fractured stones such as opal, emerald, turquoise or pearl.

Buying and selling marked silver

If you are buying, ask for a photograph of the mark, not a description of it. A seller who cannot produce one has not looked, and the mark is the single fastest way to establish what a piece is. Weight matters too: silver by weight gives you a floor under the price, and above that floor you are paying for age, maker and design.

If you are selling, photograph every mark you can find and put the purity number in the title. It is the term buyers search for. Our guide to selling antique jewelry online covers pricing and description, and the phone photography guide has a section on shooting hallmarks specifically.

Gold works on the same logic with different numbers, and our guide to gold marks covers 375, 585, 750 and the plating abbreviations.

Every piece on Nextmine is sold with the buyer's payment held until the piece has arrived and been confirmed. You can browse the silver listed right now or read how the escrow works on our how payments work page.

For a mark you cannot place, the Hallmark Society's hallmark reader takes everything stamped on a piece and reads the marks together rather than one at a time.