I was re-shooting the Masonic Token below and the date and the term "ONE PENNY" all of a sudden stood out to me and made me wonder when the term "Penny" began to refer to a One Cent coin. I know of the large Penny coins of Great Britain. Just wondering if anyone happened to know when or how the term began to be used. Or even if it was used before the word "CENT". The weird things that run through ones head when playing with our coins.:scratch: Terry
Just off the topof my head I believe the "Penny" showed up on the British Isles with the Romans. After the "Romans" got removed from Great Briton, the "Penny" remained. After the "British" got removed from the America's a unit of base 10 got established for coinage in the USA, thus the "CENT" was to replace the "Penny", just to prove there was a difference. This is rather like the opinion of why some countries believe some drive one the wrong side of the road and run their horse races in the wrong direction. If you want MY opinion, that is a wonderful photo! Nice subject, too.
I believe Penny is the English equivalent to the Germen pfenning. Both coins used to be silver though, that is why the abbreviation for the penny is "d", for denarius. The denarius was the standard Roman silver coins for centuries.
After we kicked the Brits butt out of the US the term remained, since many of their coins stayed behind. Today it is used by non-collectors, who just don't know any better. also, by those who wish to get a reminder in their posts on CT that it is a cent.
Coin World had an article about this some months ago.... I haven't got it in front of me, but if I remember correctly, it goes back to the post-colonial era when each state set its own official exchange rates for all of the various foreign coins that were floating around. In New York, the British penny had its value set at exactly one cent, in the new dollars-and-cents system that the Congress had adopted. Since "penny" was a familiar term and "cent" was new and unfamiliar, the result was that the public started calling the cents pennies, rather than calling the pennies cents. Other states adopted slightly different standards--some of them valued the British penny at 1/90 of a dollar, if I remember correctly. But the New York standard spread to the surrounding states, and with it, the habit of calling a cent a "penny". And long after U.S. coinage replaced all of the foreign stuff, the term has stuck. With over 200 years of history behind the usage, the article concluded, we can't very well claim that it's *wrong* to use the word "penny" for a one-cent coin--it's merely nontechnical. So, we should probably quit going around trying to make everyone stop doing it....
Numbers is close but not quite there. The term has probably been tied to the US Cent since the cent first appeared in 1793. In the post colonial era each state had it's own monitary system and although they varied considerably from each other they all used the Spanish milled dollar as their base. The fractional units often used the same names, but were of widely different values. The only one of these fractional unit that was close in value to the US Cent was the New York Penny which was set at 90 pennies to the dollar. Now New york was the financial center of the new country so citizen of all the states were intimately familiar with the New York Money of Account. (In most cases the monetary system of each state was a theoretical "Money of Account" that the books would be kept in and into which other states monies of account would be converted back and forth for determining payments, but except for some paper currencies they had no physical existance.) For all practical purposes 1 NY penny = 1 US cent Although people often say the cent was called a penny because of the British denomination, they was no such coin as a British penny at the time. The FIRST British copper penny would not come into existance until 1797, fourteen years after the end of the Revolutionary War, and four years after the US Cent started production. There had been a Briish penny but it was a silver coin about the size of a dime and it had not been produced for almost a hundred years. So no one alive ha ever seen one used in commerce. There was a copper half penny which was roughly the same value as the cent, but they hadn't been made for twenty years either (except for counterfeits). And you wouldn't really say a cent was a penny because it was worth a half penny would you? (And it was close, but the US Cent was actually closer in value to the New York Penny than to the British half penny.
Well you assume that just because a coin hadn't been minted for a while they were out of circulation. In the bible they referenced a lepton that hadn't been minted in 80 years, did that mean the widow did not throw hers in? Just becasue a denomination hadn't been minted recently does not mean that people did not know the denomination. The word penny is linguistically derived from pfenning, but its term of value was the denarius, hance the d abbreviation. All of the colonists reference to a penny came from their British heritage.
I never really notice. I've heard the word used interchangeably all my life and I can't think of a single person who doesn't know what a penny is or what a cent is. It probably does grate on some purists, however. I remember seeing the Penny Lady get lambasted here once, as if she didn't know the difference.
It's all to do with our great language and communication. In the English language a lot of words sound the same but are spelled different and have a very different meaning. (Cent-scent) It's not an issue in print because you can tell by the spelling what the writer is trying to get across. However in conversation it's a different story. Say for instance the Penny Lady was known as the Cent Lady and you came home at night and told your wife you bought something from the "Cent Lady", she wouldn't know if you got her a bottle of perfume:thumb:,a bottle of doe urine for deer hunting or a coin. I'm afraid Penny is here to stay no matter how much we dislike it being used in collecting.
I call a cent a penny almost as much as I call a dollar a buck. My first love was my penny collection. I rarely call it my cent collection. It just sounds too formal. And I know that the penny doesn't have that spelled on the coin. But who cares. I almost always call my friend Bob even though his name is Robert. Where did that one come from?
I wonder that, because at the time, the use of actual, whole pennies was beyond living memory at that point, whether the term 'ha'penny' or 'half-penny' had been corrupted in the vernacular language to just " 'penny" and that is how the cent came to be called a 'penny', because that is what the half-penny had become known as amongst ordinary people..
Maybe, but so did Shilling, Crown, farthing, etc. But they didn't call anything a penny because there wasn't one (at least not a physical one) So if you are going to call a cent by the name of a coin that doesn't match it's value any name would be just as good. And i will admit that they would have been familiar with the term Pence from the British, which is possibly why New York used the term. Although I still don't understand why they would either since it had no relationship to any British coin either. But it still doesn't change the fact that the cent and new york penny were closer in value than the cent and any other readily available coin or money of account. To me that very strongly argues that the cent became known as a penny because of the familiarity of people to the New York "coin" than anything else. I don't think the half penny was ever called a penny in colonial America. All references I have seen to them refered to them either as half pennies, half pence, or simply as coppers. (Now there's a thought, why weren't the 1 cent pieces known as "coppers"?) And in any case it doesn't change the fact they have probably been called Pennies since 1793 which is still the answer to the original question.
There is also the penny weight association. Penny weight was a unit of measure for blacksmiths and other commercial enterprises. I wonder if that made the term more readily available to be used as the nickname of our earliest cents? I am sure you are right about the connection of NY using the term penny, I was just arguing that THEY got it from the UK, who of course got it both from their German ancestors and from their Roman empire heritage. I always loved how an abbreviation for a penny means denarius as an ancient collector.
