While defining what a “world coin” is depends on one’s regional perspective, it’s safe for just about every purpose to describe world coins as those that originate from a nation other than that in which the collector was born or lives.

For a coin collector in the United States, world coins would categorically include coinage from any other nation, including the American collector’s neighboring countries of Canada and Mexico. While to the new collector it may seem like a challenging prospect to collect coins from outside one’s own country

The challenge in collecting world coins, predictably, is knowing where to find them. Many coin dealers stock foreign coins, but they may or may not have the ones a collector is looking for. Making the task of finding just the right world coins even harder is that many dealers who do stock foreign coins may not have them very well organized in their inventories.