We’ve also embraced £2 coins…so there
Hmmm. Brain fade.
Barristers had the same tradition didn’t they?
MizGrand writes:
> I understand that a Pound is about 1.33 - 1.5 times an American dollar, but I
> don’t understand the smaller currency names.
Currently a pound is $1.63552. And certainly $1.33 to $1.50 isn’t an accurate range for what the exchange rate has been. Over the past twenty-two years (which is how long I’ve been regularly keeping track of it), a pound has ranged anywhere from about $1.39 to about $2.10. $1.60 to $1.80 is fairly typical, I think.
And incidentally, you shouldn’t capitalize “pound”.
> Whilst watching Gordon Ramsey I notice that he uses several terms for cash.
Whilst? You’re American. Why are you using the word “whilst”?
Tailors were slow to abandon the guinea. Suits were always priced in guineas when I was younger. I think the tradition died after the decimal changeover in the early 70s.
Indeed they did but, as with tailors, the practice died out shortly after decimalisation in 1971.
It’s amazing how many people seem to think British money is still confusing, somehow. (There have been quite a lot of threads like this over the years). It’s very straightforward: 100 pence = 1 pound, just the same as 100 cents = 1 dollar.
In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s less confusing than American money, as we don’t use words like nickels, dimes, quarters etc, it’s just 5p, 10p, 20p etc. (we don’t have 25p coins).
We also have 50p coins and sometimes, just sometimes, £5 pound coins…
You think that’s bad? My sister’s ex boyfriend, when visiting from TN, didn’t even understand the concept of an exchange rate.
I was explaining the money - how a pound is divided into 100 pence.
“So a pound is a dollar?”
- “No, a pound is like a dollar, in that it is our primary unit of currency but it’s worth more.”
“Huh? How is it worth more?”
- “If I have a pound, and give it to you, and you were to give me how much it was worth in US money, you would have to give me $1.60.”
“But a pound is a dollar!”
He never did get it. “Wow, this hat’s only ten bucks!”
- “No, it’s £10. That’s about $16.”
He overspent by just over 50% the whole time he was over.
He should go to somewhere like Japan, where the yen is worth about one cent.
“Wow – so this is like a $10,000 bill?”
“Yes, but it’s worth about $100 US.”
“How can that be? It says 10000, along with all that funny writing.”
Better yet, Zimbabwe. 
When I was nine, we went to Italy (this was in 1989, before the Euro.) We got our money and holy shit were we rich! Lira just blew my fragile little nine year old mind. “Dinner is HOW MUCH?”
Strictly speaking, the £5 coins that do exist, while technically legal tender, wouldn’t really be accepted as such. They are commemorative after all.
I once bought two motorcycles in Hanoi for US$375 each, but the vendor wanted to be paid in the local currency. At the time, $1 was worth 11,000 Vietnamese dong.
Before I made the purchase I strewed the bills all over the hotel bed, and my girlfriend and I rolled around on them shouting “we’re millionaires!” a la Scrooge McDuck.
I know what you mean, but “legal tender” means that the payment has to be accepted, as settlement of a debt at least. Or the debtor could say that they tried to pay the debt but were refused.
The idea of legal tender does not apply to purchases because vendors are under no obligation to sell you anything in the first place. They can refuse any kind of payment if they want to.
Same for me, about 1987. What made it worse was the fact that the Lira symbol was the same as the British Pound symbol. First time I ordered pizza I nearly had a heart attack when the bill, came to something like £5,000. Actually, it was the equivalent of about £2.50 UK.
[Shrill pepperpot* voice]
She was two-hundred-and-six!
[/SPV]
*Pepperpot–Monty Python members’ term for middle-aged working class women they played in drag
[juvenile]
snerk
[/juvenile]
So as to avoid further confusion to the OP, somebody should mention that a crown was five shillings. Back in the day when both countries were on a full gold standard, a pound was worth about $5, and the crown was very sensibly about the size of a then U.S. dollar.
Although guineas hadn’t been manufactured since 1816 the word was still used in pricing some merchandise, which the buyer understood to mean 21/20 that number in pounds. Paul McCartney once said a guitar had cost 60 guineas, so apparently this continued until decimalization.
Well, you’re right about the dimes. The dime is an officially designated unit of account, and I suppose it would be theoretically possible to make out a check to someone in the amount of 1000 dimes rather than $100. But if you want confusing, look to the Canadians. They mark their coin “ten cents”, but call them dimes so there you go.
You may have gotten all those old, confusing coins out of your pockets. But you haven’t gotten them out of your older literature, biography, or history. We can’t read Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, or even the life stories of the Beatles without running into these terms. Often it can be important to understanding what we’re reading, because for nearly all that time, price levels were vastly lower than they are today. So what today would be an insignificant handful of change was then a respectable amount of walking-about money.
Do I even dare mention “florins” to the OP?
(Florin, was worth two shillings and denominated either “Florin” or “2 shillings”).
It gets even worse. A shilling is now understood to be 5 p, even though it’s historically 12 p, because it’s still 1/20 of a pound. Nobody I know called a 5p piece a shilling, but I’ve certainly heard British people (notably Mr. Mallard) say that a shilling is worth five (new) pence. I wonder if this happens with any of the other pre-decimal terms… I’ve only ever heard it come up with shillings. It wouldn’t make much sense with a sixpence!