A friendly field guide to the bottoms of trays, bowls, candlesticks and everything else I flip over in public
The underside of a vintage silver piece can feel like a secret code: a lion, an anchor, three initials, a number that may or may not mean what you want it to mean. It's really easy to convince yourself you've found something extraordinary. I know. I've been there, phone flashlight on, optimism fully activated.
The good news? You don't need to memorize every hallmark ever made. A handful of common marks will get you surprisingly far, and a clear photo can handle the rest once you're home with better lighting and maybe a cup of coffee.
This is part two of my vintage silver series. In part one, I walked through what I look for before anything comes home with me. Now let's flip it over.
A few more words first
If you read part one, you already know sterling, silver plate and tarnish. Here are a few more, and then everything below will make sense. Still no quiz, promise.
- Mark (or hallmark). Any little stamp pressed into the metal, usually on the bottom. Technically, a hallmark is an official stamp from a testing office, but most people use the word for any mark, and so will I.
- Solid silver. Silver all the way through, not just on the surface.
- Alloy. A mix of metals. Pure silver is too soft to actually use, so it's always blended with a little copper for strength. Even the good stuff is an alloy.
- Sterling. Solid silver that's at least 92.5% silver and 7.5% something else (usually copper). It's what most people mean when they say "real silver."
- Silver plate. A cheaper metal wearing a thin coat of silver. It looks the same on a shelf. It is not the same on a scale.
- Fineness. How pure the silver is, usually written as a number out of 1,000. So 925 means 925 parts silver out of 1,000, or 92.5%. A fineness mark is any stamp that tells you this.
First, figure out which of four things you're holding
Almost every piece falls into one of these. Everything else on the bottom is just detail.
| What it is | Marks you'll usually see | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Sterling silver | STERLING, STER or 925 (U.S.); in England, a little lion walking along with one front paw raised (called a lion passant) | At least 92.5% silver. It's worth something as metal, but who made it, how rare it is and how pretty it is usually matter more than what a scrap dealer would pay to melt it. |
| Other solid silver | COIN or COIN SILVER (older American pieces); 800, 830, 835, 900 or 950 (mainland Europe); a seated woman with a shield, called the Britannia figure (Britain) | Real silver, just a different recipe. Coin silver is usually around 90% silver, though early American pieces vary and some run lower. Britannia silver is 95.8%, which is even purer than sterling. |
| Silver plate | EPNS (electroplated nickel silver), EPBM (electroplated Britannia metal), A1, AA, TRIPLE, QUADRUPLE, SILVER SOLDERED, HOTEL PLATE | A thin skin of silver over a cheaper metal. Not much metal value, but plenty of decorative, design and collector value. Hotel plate is the heavy-duty stuff made for restaurants and hotels. |
| No silver at all | NICKEL SILVER, GERMAN SILVER, ALPACA | Mixes of copper, nickel and zinc that are silvery in color only. The name is pure marketing. |
Quick warning about EPBM: Britannia metal is a tin-heavy, pewter-like metal and has nothing to do with Britannia silver. Same word, totally different stuff. Silver is full of little tricks like this.
And one rule before you go any further: a number only means something alongside the country, the maker and the other marks. A 925 stamp all by itself doesn't prove anything.
The marks that sound way more exciting than they are
Vintage silver has a few repeat offenders: marks that look like dates, purity claims or proof of sterling, but aren't. These are the ones most likely to send an innocent shopper into a premature victory lap.
| The mark | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| "Sheffield" or "Sheffield England" | Usually just the city where modern silver plate was made. The collectible stuff is Old Sheffield Plate: a sheet of silver fused onto copper by hand, made roughly from the 1740s to the 1840s, before electroplating existed. It rarely announces itself that neatly. |
| 1847 Rogers Bros | A famous silver plate brand name. The 1847 isn't the year it was made, and it has nothing to do with the silver content. |
| IS | Usually International Silver: the company, not the purity. It doesn't mean sterling. |
| A1 / Quadruple Plate | Old sales talk about how thick or good the silver coating was. Quadruple plate doesn't mean four layers of sterling (sadly). |
| Weighted Sterling | A thin sterling shell filled with cement, plaster, resin or steel so it stands steady (super common on candlesticks). The number on your scale includes the filling. |
| Nickel Silver / German Silver | No silver in it at all, despite the name. EPNS just means someone plated a thin layer of silver on top. |
And the biggest trap of all: the pseudo-hallmark. Lots of English and American silver plate makers stamped a tidy row of little lions, heads and letters designed to look exactly like official British hallmarks. It works. It's worked on me. The giveaway is what's missing: real British sterling always has a fineness mark. If the row has no lion passant or fineness mark, and especially if EPNS or an American maker's name is sitting nearby, you're holding plate.
British marks work as a team
In Britain, silver has long had to go to an official testing office, called an assay office, before it could be sold. The office checks the metal and stamps it. So a real British hallmark is a little group of stamps meant to be read together:
- A maker's mark (officially the sponsor's mark): usually initials in a small shape, telling you who made or sent in the piece.
- A fineness mark: the stamp that says the silver's up to standard.
- An assay-office mark: the testing office's town symbol. London is a leopard's face, Birmingham is an anchor, Sheffield is a crown (a rose from 1975 on) and Edinburgh is a castle.
- A date letter: a single letter in a shaped outline that stands for the year it was tested. Super handy for dating, though it's been optional since 1999.
The lion passant, that walking lion, is the English fineness mark for sterling. The Britannia figure marks the purer 958 standard. Scottish sterling plays by slightly different rules, so you might see a thistle or a lion rampant (standing up on its hind legs) instead. Irish silver uses a crowned harp.
And a lion, crown or anchor on its own might just be a company's logo. An anchor next to a lion passant is Birmingham sterling. An anchor next to a lion and a letter G is Gorham's trademark, which tells you nothing about the metal. In other words: don't let one handsome little animal make the whole decision for you.
Maker names I always notice
A good maker can add interest and value, but the maker's name doesn't tell you what the metal is. Lots of respected companies made both sterling and plate, so the quality mark still gets the final word. Same goes for Towle, Wallace and Whiting: lovely names, but they don't settle sterling versus plate.
| Name | What I check next |
|---|---|
| Tiffany & Co. | A separate STERLING or 925 mark next to the name. |
| Gorham | The word STERLING. Gorham's lion-anchor-G logo is famous, but they made plenty of plate too. |
| Reed & Barton | Sterling or plate? Their Francis I pattern (one of their designs, loaded with fruit and flowers) is the famous sterling one, so check the mark before you get attached. |
| International Silver | Which of its many brands it is. It owned dozens of names, and a lot of them are plate. IS alone says nothing about purity. |
| Christofle | Whether it's plate (most of it, and it's excellent) or one of the rarer solid silver pieces, which carry a tiny helmeted head, France's mark for real silver. |
| Elkington / Mappin & Webb / Walker & Hall | Whether those little symbols are a real British hallmark with a lion, or pseudo-hallmarks on plate. |
How I research a mark
- Photograph the whole piece, then every stamp. Soft, indirect light keeps the glare down. For shallow or worn marks, hold your phone flashlight low and almost flat against the surface, shining across it instead of down on it. The shadows make each stamp pop.
- Write down exactly what I see, including punctuation, symbols and numbers. Zoom in on the photo. It sees way more than your eyes do in a thrift store aisle.
- Figure out the likely country before deciding what any symbol means. A lion in England and a lion in Ohio are very different animals.
- Separate the maker from the metal. Who made it and what it's made of are two different questions, often answered by two different stamps.
- Compare the exact shape and spacing with a good hallmark reference book or online marks database. Marks change over the years, and fakes are out there.
Keep this on your phone
You don't need to memorize the entire history of silver. With a little practice, the familiar marks start jumping out at you. And just as useful, you'll start noticing when a piece needs more research before you hand over any money.
Next up in the series: how I clean and care for vintage silver without scrubbing away the good stuff. Happy hunting!
The Vintage Silver Series
New to vintage silver? Start with part one and work your way through.
- How I Choose Vintage Silver for My Home
- Sterling, Silver Plate and What Those Tiny Marks Mean (you're here)
- How I Clean and Care for Vintage Silver