A penny is 1/100 of a British pound. Maybe from that
The word “penny” has been used for small copper-based coins for millennia. Proto-Germanic “panningaz” → Proto-West-Germanic “panning” → Old English “penning” → Middle English “penny”.
A penny is one twelfth of a shilling; a shilling is half a florin, or one fifth of a half-crown; a half-crown is a quarter of a pound. Hence, there were 240 pennies in a pound.
An American cent was typically very close to the value of a British penny. One one-hundredth of a pound is presently called a pence.
Germanic languages express small fractions of coins that way: penny → pence is cognate with the German Pfennig, which was one hundredth of a Mark, for instance.
Prior to decimalization in 1971 a penny was 1/240th of one pound
One one-hundredth of a pound is a penny. “Pence” is the plural.
I did a bunch of searching to figure out what CDV could possibly mean in this sentence. Childhood domestic violence, perhaps? That doesn’t really quite fit.
Criminal Domestic Violence?
Chronic Domestic Violence?
Well, color me surprised. I thought that those initials were somewhat more widely known in this context than they apparently are, as most hits on CDV crime come back to my residential state.
Anyway, if anyone’s still interested and hasn’t figured it out, “criminal domestic violence.”
Also never issued a ‘nickel,’ and originally the ‘nickel’ referred to. . . a penny!
Does that mean some domestic violence is not criminal?
Wouldn’t know, as I didn’t come up with that particular TLA, but I suspect not.
My bad.
There was (and is) a British coin of roughly similar value called a penny, and the name got transferred over in informal speech
In related “interesting fact” news, the American dime is the only unit of currency which does not state its explicit value. The penny says “one cent,” the quarter says “quarter dollar,” every bill gives its dollar value, etc etc… but the dime says only “one dime.”
(I would have sworn I read that in this thread, but a search uncovers nothing, so… enjoy!)
Doesn’t “dime” mean “tenth part” just as “cent” means “hundredth part”? Same root as “tithe”, I think.
Sure, but it’s indirect. Most people wouldn’t know the etymology. People know the value because they’ve learned to associate “dime” with ten cents, not because they’re reverse-engineering the value based on the derived meaning.
Here is the post in part one that mentions currency but does not address the part about the anonymity of the dime.
But in those days it would have been 1/240. At the then exchange rates a cent was worth roughly about the same as a British penny
As a digressive aside, at one time, when the US $ waa about 4 to the pound, a half-crown coin (2s6d, i.e., 1/8 of a pound) might be jokily called “half a dollar”.
(Thinking back, I have a vague memory that I may have read it in the context of overseas tourism operators reluctantly accepting American currency, but disliking the dime, because the lack of an explicit value that could be read by front-line staff made conversion somewhat dicey. Search is failing me and the claim seems questionable, so I can’t point to anything more concrete. But the ambiguous value label is interesting by itself.)