Penny

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“Pence” redirects here. For other uses, see Pence (disambiguation).

A variety of "low value" coins, including an Irish 2p piece and many U.S. pennies.

Two British 2 pence coins (below) and a 5 pence coin (above)

This article is about the unit of currency. Penny is also a familiar diminutive of the name Penelope.

A penny (pl. pence or pennies) is a coin or a unit of currency used in several English-speaking countries.

1 Value
2 Other uses
3 Nails
4 Criticism
5 See also
6 References
7 External link

[edit] Value

The penny is among the lowest denomination of coins in circulation.

1/100 of the British Pound Sterling (see British one penny coin), the former Irish pound, the Gibraltar pound, the Falkland Islands 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 common 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 addition, variants of the word penny, with which they share a common root, are or were the names of certain units of currency in non-English-speaking countries:

A fening is 1/100 of a Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark
A pfennig was 1/100 of a German mark
A penni was 1/100 of a Finnish markka

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.

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 United Kingdom pennies were issued, according to the Royal Mint.

[edit] Other uses

To "spend a penny" in British idiom means to urinate. The etymology 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.

[edit] Nails

In the US, the length of a nail is designated by its penny size. It is commonly believed that the origin of the term "penny" in relation to nail size is based on the old custom in England of selling nails by the hundred. A hundred nails that sold for six pence were "six penny" nails. The larger the nail, the more a hundred nails would cost. Thus the larger nails have a larger number for its penny size. This classification system was still used in England in the 18th century, but is obsolete there.

The penny size is written with a number and the abbreviation d for penny (e.g. - 10d). D is an abbreviation for denarius, a Roman coin similar to a penny; this was the abbreviation for a penny in the UK before decimalisation. A smaller number indicates a shorter nail and a larger number indicates a longer nail. Nails under 1¼ in., often called brads, are sold mostly in small packages with only a length designation (e.g. ½" (12 mm), 1¹⁄₈" (28 mm), etc.).

[edit] 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]