penny

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,the Irish pound the Gibraltar Pound, the Falkland Pound, 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" referred to pence coinage until 1859, since there was a coin with the word "penny" on it (for pence). This name stuck even when the word "penny" was removed from the coin. Like their US counterparts, the Royal Canadian Mint and the Federal Government of Canada officially refer to the coin as 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.

Other uses

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.^[1] The government advised that in speech the new units should be called "pee" to distinguish them from the older "pennies" or "pence".^[2] This led to the mournful complaint of "5p a pee!" at the station toilet charge.

Criticism

The physical handling and counting of pennies creates transaction costs that may be higher than a penny per penny spent. Furthermore, as has been claimed for micropayments, due to mental transaction costs one cent may exceed the useful price granularity of almost all products and services sold over the counter -- granularities of five or ten cents may be sufficient. Also, inflation periodically causes the metal value of pennies to exceed their face value, making them wasteful to mint.^{[3] [4]} Several nations have stopped minting equivalent value coins, and efforts have been made to end the routine use of pennies in the U.S.[1].

See also

• Penny (British coin)
  • History of the English penny coin, AD 785-1971
  • British coinage
• Penny (Canadian coin)
• Irish penny coin
  • Irish penny (decimal coin)
• Penny (U.S. coin)
  • United States coinage
  • History of the Lincoln cent
  • 1943 steel cent
  • 1955 doubled die cent
  • Take a penny, leave a penny
• Pfennig
• Smashed penny
• Legal Tender Modernization Act

References

1. ^ BBC Nation on Film - Rise and Fall of LNER Mod Cons - Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding: "Spend a 6d in the superloo"
2. ^ money slang history
3. ^ New York Times, " AROUND THE NATION; Treasurer Says Zinc Penny May Save $50 Million a Year", April 1, 1981
4. ^ USA Today, Barbara Hagenbaugh, "Coins cost more to make than face value", May 10, 2006

External links

• Official specifications
• The MegaPenny Project - A visualisation of what exponential numbers of pennies would look like.