Watch Video >>

In Southern California, if anything lasts a year, it is a collectible. If it last 10 years, it is an antique.

OK. Bad joke.

Brainy Dictionary defines collectibles as “capable of being collected.” I am a lover of words and dictionaries. I have to say that this definition is one of the un-brainiest that I have run across. Anything can be “capable of being collected.” Woops, maybe that is the point!

WordWeb Online defines collectibles as “Things considered to be worth collecting (not necessarily valuable or antique).” This definition prompted thoughts about who decides what should be considered collectible, and led me back to the old proverb, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The WorldWeb definition is thought-provoking but basically does not get down to the gist of the matter.

eBay defines a collectible as “an item whose value originally revolved around its utility or aesthetic attributes but has since been enhanced by widespread interest.” Then eBay goes on to state that most people use 50 years as the turning point when a collectible becomes an antique. So, the answer is that anything that was made roughly 51 years ago is considered an antique, right?

Wrong. The US government has the final say, at least in the United States. The government declares that to be an antique, an object must be at least 100 years old. Of course, we antique and collectible dealers ignore the government in our day-to-day transactions by defaulting back to the 50-year delineation.

Actually, using a 100-year demarcation between an antique and a collectible in the United States is very interesting. In Asia and Europe, written history goes back many centuries. Written history in the United States started with the first European settlers. The United States is a very young nation in comparison. It would not surprise me if experts in other parts of the world are scandalized by our definitions of antiques and collectibles.

How many of us are antiques and how many of us are collectibles?