The tarot suits are inherited from ordinary playing cards, which reached Europe in the later fourteenth century with their four suits already in place.
The suit that did not change
A surviving Mamluk pack in the Topkapi Palace collection in Istanbul carries cups, coins, swords and polo-sticks. Coins passed into the European Latin suits with no alteration at all, which makes it the most conservative of the four. Where the polo-stick had to be reinterpreted as a baton by copyists who did not recognise it, a coin needed no translation anywhere.
The suit is still called deniers in French Latin-suited packs and denari or oro in Italian and Spanish ones, all of them plain words for money.
Pentacles is a later name
The name Pentacles, and the five-pointed star drawn on the disc, are not part of that inheritance. They belong to the nineteenth-century occult reworking of the tarot, in which the suit was assimilated to the disc or pentacle of ceremonial magic and to the element Earth. Decks in the Golden Dawn line use the newer name and older Latin-suited packs do not.
This atlas records the suit under its older name and notes the newer one, because a reader meeting Pentacles in a modern deck and Coins in a Marseille pack is looking at the same suit under two names from two different centuries.
Sources The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake CityMichael Dummett with A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult TarotRonald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett