Penny
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A variety of "low value" coins, including an Irish 2p piece and many U.S. pennies. |
This article is about the unit of currency. Penny is also a familiar version of the name Penelope.
A penny (pl. pence or pennies) is a unit of currency or a coin used in several English-speaking countries:
* 1/100 of the British Pound Sterling or the Irish pound (1971–2001), or a coin with that value: see history of the English penny.
* 1/240 of the British pound sterling or Irish pound prior to February 15, 1971, of the Pound Scots prior to 1707, and also the pre-decimalisation currencies of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (1/12 of the shilling), or a coin of that value.
* a standard but unofficial name for the one-cent coin in the United States and in Canada, worth 1/100 of the dollar: see penny (U.S. coin), penny (Canadian coin). This word is not used by the United States Mint or the Royal Canadian Mint; they use cent.
In the USA and Canada, "penny" is normally used to refer to the coin; the quantity of money is a "cent". Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the plural of "penny" is "pence" when referring to a quantity of money and "pennies" when referring to a number of coins. Thus a coin worth five times as much as one penny is worth five pence, but "five pennies" means five coins each of which is a penny. Similarly, in the United States and Canada, a coin worth five times the value of a penny is worth "five cents", but "five pennies" means five one-cent coins, and the plural form pence'' is not used.
In Canada, penny originally referred to pence coinage that they used until 1859, since there was a coin with the word "penny" on it (for pence). Since this was a term that they used for many years, the One Cent denomination stayed with the penny nickname ever since. The
Royal Canadian Mint and the Federal
Government of Canada don't officially call the One Cent coin a penny but a "One Cent" coin.
When dealing with British or Irish (pound) money, amounts of the decimal "new pence" less than £1 may be suffixed with "p", as in 2p, 5p, 26p, 72p. Pre-1971 amounts of less than 1/- (one shilling) were denoted with a "d" which derived from the term "
denarius", as in 2d, 6d, 10d. The lettering "new pence" was changed to "pence" on British decimal coinage in 1982. Irish pound decimal coinage only used "p" to designate units (possibly as this sufficed for both the English word "pence", and Irish form "pingin").
In
2004, 530,110,000 pennies were issued, according to the
Royal Mint.
To "spend a penny" in British
idiom means to
urinate. The eytmology of the phrase is literal; some public toilets used to be coin-operated, with a pre-decimal penny being the charge levied. Eventually, at around the same time as the introduction of
decimal coinage,
British Rail gradually introduced better public toilets with the name
Superloo and the much higher charge of 6d.
[BBC Nation on Film - Rise and Fall of LNER Mod Cons - Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding: "Spend a 6d in the superloo"] The government advised that in speech the new units should be called "pee" to distinguish them from the older "pennies" or "pence".
[money slang history] This led to the mournful complaint of "5p a pee!" at the station toilet charge.
*
Penny (British coin)*
Penny (U.S. coin)*
Penny (Canadian coin)*
1943 steel cent*
1955 doubled die cent*
History of the English penny coin, AD 785-1971*
United States coinage*
Smashed penny*
Irish penny coin,
Irish penny (decimal coin)*
British coinage*
History of the Lincoln cent*
Pfennig*
Take a penny, leave a penny*
Official specifications*
The MegaPenny Project - A visualisation of what exponetial numbers of pennies would look like.
