Pennies Considered To Be The Keys

Metalman,

My grandfather used to say that pennies are from England and doctors are just practising.

Aceman732, I believe that the term penny is derived from the term Pence. It comes from the period before decimalisation when Pounds, Shillings and Pence were utilized. If I remember correctly, there were 12 Pence in a Shilling.

So far as the story about penny vs cents goes, one of our beloved moderators has as mild dislike for the propensity in America to refer to a cent as a penny. Once in awhile, someone (like me) enjoys jabbing him about it. See, he has a great cents of humor.
Jim

someone needs to market coin sized planchets with either "RARE" or "Extremely Rare" on them to fill the slots in albums tht won't get filled other wise. To go all out, they could state the year and type like "1913 Liberty nickel, Extremely Rare, 5 Known" or something like that. With all the albums out there there should be a market to be made.

I often wondered about that myself. The common answer given that it comes from the British Penny or Pence is silly.

Let's see we have a copper coin that is worth one one hundredth of a dollar. Let's nickname it after a silver coin from another country, that hasn't even existed for a 150 years and no one has ever seen, which if it did exist would be worth more than twice as much as our copper one, and that takes 240 pieces to equal their base unit instead of 100.

Now the HALF penny was a copper coin that was roughly equal to the value of the cent, so if we were calling it something based on the British coins we would have called it a halfpence.

So where did the term penny come from? I think I finally found out. New York was one of the most prominent states in the late 18th century and accounted for a great deal of the countries commerce. Now like most of the states they had their own "money of account". But being the biggest many merchants kept their books in New York money of account because it made commerce easier. Like the other states they based their dollar of the Spanish milled dollar. But New York had a theoretical "New York penny" that was worth 90 pennies to the dollar. This meant that a Federal cent was worth .9 pennies. A value much closer to being equal to than a theoretical British Penny.

So here we have a "penny" of the right time frame, value, domestic rather than a that of a recent enemy, and which the businesses are already familiar with using. This is where I believe it where our cent got it's slang name of penny.