Can someone clarify British currancy for me? I searched, but didn’t find anything simple and obvious.
I know that pence go into a shilling, and shillings into a pound, but how much? And what about the slang? And what’s the approximate exchange to dollars?
Thanks!
PS: Reading Angela’s Ashes…allt he talk of money is driving me batty…they pay rent of 6&6 a week…6 shillings and sixpence.
You want someone to clarify OLD British currency. NEW British currency is simple:
100 New Pence (or simply ‘p’) = 1 pound (or slangily, 1 quid)
Current exchange rate is about $1.50 to the British pound.
I can’t help you with the old currency. I don’t remember how it worked anymore, but I do know it was ridiculously complex.
British currency and their strange habit of driving on the wrong side of the road are the main reasons that England is the way it is.
As near as I can figure out, the unit of British currency is the pound (sterling). The pound is sub-divided into 100 Pence. One penny is the lowest unit available. Coins are available in 1 penny, 2 pence, 5 pence, 10 pence, 20 pence and 50 pence . There are also the pound coin and the two pound coin.
Notes are available in 5 pounds , 10 pounds , 20 pounds (there is also a new 20 pound note) and 50 pound notes.
The current rate of exchange (1 minute old) is at:
well I don’t know how the shillings used to work, but they don’t use them any more so unless it’s for reading puropeses it doesn’t matter. but a pound is a british dollar, not in value but how they use it. A quid is slang for a pound. there are pence which are like the US coins, but they have, IIRC, 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p. the least I remember the exchange rate was something like 1.6 US dollars to 1 quid. hope this helps sorry I don’t know about the shillings
There was a thread on this a while back. In any case, shillings aren’t used anymore.
In current English money, there are 100 pence (“p”) to the pound. One pound equals about US$0.65. A “quid” is slang for a pound. But this won’t help you for figuring out what the Angela’s Ashes money was equivalent to in American money, since that was the “old” money (from before shillings were removed from circulation), and didn’t the McCourts use Irish money anyway? (Not being flip; I really don’t know if English money was used in Ireland at that time, for some English/Irish political or economic reason.)
Oh, you want the OLD conversion! OK, here THAT is:
http://www.peak.org/shrewsbury/References/currency.html
Elizabethan denominations US$ equivalents (rough)
Basic equivalents
1 pound (£) = 20 shillings (s) 400.00 1 shilling = 12 pence (pennies) 20.00
1 penny (plural: pence) $ 1.66
Gold Coins
Sovereign = (about) 1 £ $400.00
Royal = (about) 10 - 14 shillings $200.00 to $280.00
Angel = (about) 7 - 10 shillings $140.00 to $200.00
roughly about 1/2 £
Noble = about the same as an Angel
Silver Coins
Crown = 5 shillings $100.00
so: 4 Crowns = 1 £ $400.00
Half Crown = 2 1/2 shillings (2 shillings sixpence) $ 50.00
Sixpence = half a shilling $ 10.00
Groat = 4 pence $ 6.60
Threepenny piece = 3 pence $ 5.00
Half groat = 2 pence $ 3.30
Penny $ 1.66
Threefarthing piece = 3/4 penny $ 1.20
Halfpenny piece $ .80
Farthing = one-fourth penny $ .40
Sorry, I got the numbers reversed. Edward’s exchange rate is correct - if you give the bank US$1.00, they give you back about 65p. If you give them about US$1.60, they give you back one pound.
Just to append tcburnett’s excellent response:
They stopped making the crown, the half-crown, the guinea (1 crown + 1 shilling, I believe) and the sovreign (don’t remember what it consisted of) as actual coins long before the switch to metric currency, but they stayed around as terms when that amount was used.
Therefore, if something cost a crown, you’d give them 5 shilling coins.
Odd, isn’t it?
It’s not all that weird. Here in the US we say “Nickel” and “Dime” and “Penny”. None of these indicates the value of the coin, as “Quarter” (for “quarter-dollar”), “Half Dollar”, and “Dollar” do. We still say “buck” and (rarely) “sawbuck” and “C-note”. With the advent of the new “golden dollars” I’ve heard people calling them “sackies” (for “Sacajawea”) , the same way Canadian call their dollar coins “Loonies” (for the Loon that’s on them). Both these examples mimic the old British “Crown”, which was so-called because it had an image of a crown on it.
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And what was a florin?
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The abbreviation for pence was “d”. Thus the L s d monetary system, noted for inducing confusion and causing memory loss.
A guinea were 21 shillings (or 1.05 pounds).
The Guinea is still used,
At horse auctions and in prize money for horse races.
I think it is still sometimes used in some of the upper-crust antiques auctions too.
As an aside - the Florin is descended from the Florint which was an early gold coin minted in Florence in the 1200’s.
Couple of things that have been missed,
The pound sterling is now a coin rather than a note.
We now have a £2 coin.
There are oddities around but you will rarely see them such as the 25pence piece(harks back to the crown) and I have seen a specially minted half-guinea which was presented to a colleague when I was in the Royal Navy.
I think the Scots also have a £100 note .
The following were used recently and a few people will talk about them as if they are current.
Shilling = 5 pence
Two bob or two shillings or florin = ten pence
Half a crown =dead
Crown =long dead
Ten bob or ten shillings = fifty pence
Quid, nicker, beer token = Pound sterling
I love the Dope. I can count on y’all.
Now let me ask another…and if I don’t get any answer here I’ll make a new thread.
Lira. What the HELL are they thinking? And why doesn’t someone get it together already?
And more specifically… I wonder how 1 billion dollars is expressed/converted into lira? A trillion? How many zeros on the lira amount?
My understanding (if you can call it that) is that it’s something like 1000-1 conversion lira to dollars?
Always sounds like it…
H
I’m not sure we should criticize the Limeys for their money system. Let’s take a look at American currency:
Sawbuck= 50 or 100 Dollars (1 dollar equals … . .75 a pound?)
Buck=Dollar
Clam=Dollar
Benjamin=100 dollars
Franklin=100 dollars
Grand=1000 dollars
G=1000 dollars
C-note=100 dollars
10 spot=10 dollars
Fin=5 dollars
Bone=dollar
Fiver=five dollars
I’ve also heard fellow Yanks divide our money into 10s and 100s: $150 becomes a “Buck-fifty”, and $10,000 becomes “10 Dimes”.
TheUglytruth:
The only comment I have is that a “sawbuck” is NOT 50 or 100 dollars. It is 10 dollars. The reasoning behind the nickname is that the Roma numeral “X” appeared on the old ten dollar bills, and it looked like the stand used to hold logs being sawed. Books usually explain that the term has nothing to do with the term “buck” used for one dolar bills, but it seems to me that the similarity in name is precisely the thing that WOULD help it be adopted. Similarly, a “double sawbuck” was a twenty dollar bill, so-called because it had TWO X’s on it (XX). I have never heard “double sawbuck” used in real life, although I’ve actually herad “sawbuck”.
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Okay, it’s not really a currency complaint, and for all I know it might only apply to certain states in the US, but what’s going on with tax?
I spent some time in Los Angeles and was continually caught out by shop staff adding the tax on to the labelled price. More than once something I thought I could afford suddenly became embarrassing at the counter.
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Yes, but hardly anyone uses most of those. Sounds more like a gangster movie than anything else. The British money system is now quite simple, though. The younger generation probably has no idea what a guinea is, either.
mattk wrote:
> Okay, it’s not really a currency complaint, and for all I
> know it might only apply to certain states in the US, but
> what’s going on with tax?
>
> I spent some time in Los Angeles and was continually
> caught out by shop staff adding the tax on to the
> labelled price. More than once something I thought I
> could afford suddenly became embarrassing at the counter.
Yes, sales tax is not included in the price that’s on the merchandise. Sales tax is charged in all stores and restaurants. It exists in all except a few states. It’s around 5%, but it varies from one state to the next. There are various quirky regulations about things that are exempt from tax in certain states, but the easiest thing to do is to assume that everything in a store is taxed.