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This article is about the coin. For other uses, see Penny (disambiguation).
"Pence" redirects here. For other uses, see Pence (disambiguation).
A one penny coin from Ghana
A variety of low value coins, including a (historical) Irish 2 pence piece and many United States pennies.
A penny (pl. pence or pennies) is a coin or a unit of currency used in several English-speaking countries.
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In the 8th century, Charlemagne declared that 240 pennies or Pfennigs should be minted from a pound of silver. A single coin thus contained 1.5 to 2 grams of silver.
The penny is among the lowest denomination of coins in circulation.
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:
In the United States 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"Penny - Oxford English Dictionary". oed.com.. 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").
The British penny as a unit of currency dates back well over a thousand years, and for most of that period the silver penny was the principal denomination in circulation.
 
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| O: Draped bust of Aethelred left. +ÆĐELRED REX ANGLOR | R: Long cross. +EADPOLD MO CÆNT |
| Anglo-Saxon silver \'Long Cross\' penny of Aethelred II, moneyer Eadwold, Canterbury, c. 997-1003. The cross made cutting the coin into half-pennies or farthings (quarter-pennies easier | |
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.BBC Nation on Film - Rise and Fall of LNER Mod Cons - Engines Must Not Enter the Potato Siding: "Spend a 6d in the superloo"
Finding a penny is sometimes considered lucky and gives rise to the saying, "Find a penny pick it up, all the day you\'ll have good luck." This may be a corruption of "See a pin and pick it up, all the day you\'ll have good luck" and similar verses, as quoted in The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore and other sources.
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 now.
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.).
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.[citation needed] Also, inflation periodically causes the metal value of pennies to exceed their face value, making them wasteful to mint.New York Times, "AROUND THE NATION; Treasurer Says Zinc Penny May Save $50 Million a Year", April 1, 1981USA Today, Barbara Hagenbaugh, "Coins cost more to make than face value", May 10, 2006 Several nations have stopped minting equivalent value coins, and efforts have been made to end the routine use of pennies in the United States.Lewis, Mark (2002-07-05). Ban The Penny. Forbes.com. Retrieved on 2007-07-16.
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