Pounds,pence,last stupid question.

Pounds Sterling is a decimal system just like dollars i.e. 100 pence to the pound.

Notes come on £5, £10, £20 and £50 denominations (although you'll be unlikely to see £50 notes). They are easy to distinguish from each other because they are different colours and sizes.

Coins are as follows:
1p (small and copper coloured)
2p (big copper)
5p (smallest coin, silver coloured)
10p (big coin, silver)
20p (inbetween 5p and 10p in size, but an octagonal shape)
50p (like 20p but much bigger)
£1 (thick and gold coloured)
£2 (thick, big, gold with a silver centre).

All coins and notes are very easy to distinguish from each other (they're designed for blind people to be able to distinguish them)

PS this link to the Bank of England website will help you with picture of the notes:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/design.htm

By the way, I know it's been said many times before, but my daughter is in England right now and has commented on how poor the exchange rate is making everything quite expensive. Nonetheless, she's having a great time.

you can see pictures of the current British coins here, http://www.royalmint.com/talk/specifications.asp

In order of increasing size and denomination (the two are directly related):

5GBP a small green/blue note

10GBP a slightly larger red/brown note

20GBP a larger blue/purple note

50GBP a large red note


As for the exchange rate, nothing you can do about it - however, it encourages UK tourism in America boosting your home economy so it's not all bad!

The 20p and 50p coins are not octagonal: they have seven sides, not eight.

The Eyewitness Guide to London has color pictures of all the coins and bills and details of the value of each.

Thanks for the quick reply ..

And how did/do crowns and schillings fit in? I've always been curious, but not enough to look it up.

Shillings (£0.05) and real pence (1 1/12 of a shilling)fitted in when the pound was worth $2.80. So think how lucky you are.

Crowns (5 shillings, or 5/- as we wrote it then) fitted in rather earlier, when the pound was worth even more.

If you're not careful we'll bring them back. If you think things are pricey now, wait and see what happens then.

Crowns and shillings were part of the old pre-decimal monetary system that was abandonned in the 1970's (I think). Some older people still use this terminology - which is tremendously confusing to tourists - and increasingly incomprehensible to others.

I have also heard people say "guinea" which is apparently a pound plus something else they no longer have - perhaps it works out to a pound plus 10pence?

A guinea was 21 shillings. It didn't exist as an actual unit of currency.

A guinea was 21 shillings, or a pound and a shilling. Quite how and why this was introduced I don't know, but eventually it came to be a sign of pricing luxury goods (and professional fees).

I don't think you'll find many people referring to the old currency - still less to all the old variant slang names for coins and values - a tanner, a bob, half a dollar (now that goes back to the days when there were $4 to the pound, so a half-crown was worth half a dollar). I don't even hear 'quid' or 'nicker' for a pound very often.

I remember Guineas. They were used when advertising expensive items like furniture because they sounded cheaper: 50 guineas, for example, was actually £52.50. They were also used by hotels and guest houses for quoting weekly rates because a guinea (21 shillings) was easily divisible by seven; ten guineas per week, for example, was 30 shillings (£1.50) per day.

Guineas are still used when associated with prizes for horse racing.

There are slang words for British money. I guess tuppence is 2p. What is a quid?

A quid is or was a pound. 'Tuppence' is the sound for pronouncing 'twopence' (likewise 'thruppence', for which the coin was called a 'thruppeny bit' - or 'thrippeny', and very very old silver ones were I think called a 'joey').

But nowadays, the convention is [number] + pence (or pee) - even (to my annoyance) 'one pence'. Such is inflation, 'spending a penny' no longer costs one pee, it's usually more like 20p.

I visited the UK for the first time in 1971, months after D(ecimal) day which was in April 1971.

It used to be 20 shillings made up a pound and 12 pennies made up a shilling. So something could cost 3 pounds 10 shilling 6 pence. Just think how much fun it used to be to get change from a £5 bank note (in this case 1 pound, 9 shillings 6 pence); almost as stupid as people who use such archaic units as yards, feet, inches (actually believe it or not as I understand it, this is the one place the Brits have been able to resist the EU rules on using metric measurements).

But as for the current, the 1p coin looks like a US penny, the 2p coin is the same bronze colour but much larger, the 5p coin looks like a US dime, the 10p coint looks like a US quarter, the 20p coin is not quite round, the 50p coin is a large silver coin which is not round, the £1 is a nice thick gold coin, and the £2 is a large fairly thick gold coin. The smallest paper money in the UK is £5.

My quick story is the first time I visited the UK in 1971, I took an Underground ride and the fare was 5p..(1 shilling). I gave the clerk a £1 bank note and got back 9 10p coins some of which were 2 shilling coins (the 10p coin was deliberately made the same size, thickness etc as 2 shillings) and a 1 shilling coin (which was the 5p coin). Putting all those coins in my pocket immediately taught me why the currency was called the pound...boy were those coins big. At that time, the 6 old pence coin (1/2 a shilling) was converted to 2 1/2 new pence (2.5p) and there was also a 1/2 p coin!

shanart: For your convenience you might want to go to the following site and print up some "cheat sheets" to give to your fellow travelers. It will be of great help in figuring conversion rates from dollars to pounds and vice versa:

http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic

We always stick one in our wallets when we travel and use it a lot.

To Patrick, GeoffHamer, Kate, Flanneruk, etc. who know a thing or two about British currencies, have you heard of a "lack" or something that sounds like that ? I vaguely recall my grandparents (long time ago) using this term, I believe in reference to property values but cannot find any explanation for it.

Could it be one of those Anglo-Indian things?

In Indlish, a lakh is 100,000. South Asians rarely use thousands or millions: they talk of lakhs and crores (=10 million).

Many families use bits of Indlish, and many use examples unique to them. My mother, who's only once been east of West Ham (and that was Torremolinos) has a clutch of Indlish words (like "dhobi" for the washing), used by no-one else, that her father brought back.

Many grandparents, from many different walks of life, spent time somewhere in South Asia, and brought all sorts of things - from malaria to funny model elephants and odd words - back with them.

That's a new one on me, Mathieu

Flanneruk, your posts are always amusing and fun to read !

The reference to your mother reminds me of another funny mother whose phrases were peppered with Indlish - Gerald Durrell's kindly and patient 'mother', who was immortalised (to her chagrin, I'm sure), in his hilarious collection of family stories about growing up as a child in Corfu during the 40s or 50s.

You could be on the money (sorry!) in that the word is an Anglo Indian term, since we were living in British colonial East Africa at the time of my grandparents. No surviving family can explain it, though your version sounds plausible enough. Thanks.

Ah, nostalgia time. Here in Oz we went over to decimal currency in 1966, but I well remember primary school anguish when learning to subtract £6/14/10-1/2 (six pounds fourteen and tenpence ha'penny) from $11/4/3 (eleven pounds four and 'thrippence'). Good riddance.

We too have lost the old slang terms, with nothing to replace them but the American "buck". This despite the fact that after all these years Americans still use the term "penny".

In our case a pound was a quid (five of them a 'fiver'), a shilling was a 'bob', a sixpence was a 'zac' and, less commonly, thrippence could be a 'trey'. A shilling could also be a 'deener', based on 'dinar', a term brought back from the Middle East by Australian troops in WW1.

To my American friends - I strongly recommend the use of $1 and $2 coins and the abolition of $1 bills. You've got no idea how cheering it can be to fish around in your fob pocket and discover that you're $10-15 better off than you thought you were. It beats having a fat wallet bulging with what on closer inspection turn out to be nothing but $1 bills, a situation that often distressed me in the US.

I'm surprised that 'yards', 'feet' etc. still persist in the UK. Admittedly people here are likely to refer to someone's height as 'six feet', but officially and in the media the old non-metric measures are never used. I'm even more surprised at the dogged attachment of Americans to, of all things, British imperial measures.

BTW, we got rid of 1c and 2c coins some time ago - too much of a nuisance.

Apologies for sexism in previous post. For "fob pocket" read "fob pocket or purse".

How boring the world is becoming--all decimals and everything divisable by 10. Part of the dumbing down and standarization of the world--all bow to the altar of globalization and everything in shades of gray.

Every time the US has issued a (new, improved) $1 coin to prepare for the ultimate discontinuance of the $1 note, it has been met with national flipping of digits. People don't want it, they don't use the coins, and the coins end up being reclaimed by the mint and turned into something more useful, like quarters.

I suspect that the US, like many other countries, will simply leapfrog from a 19th C. model into a post-cash model one of these days, where you swipe your card everywhere. Certainly we use cash less and less every year.

I do think, though, that the withdrawal of low-denomination notes and their replacement with coins is an insidious way to raise prices. I cannot yet (after how many years) deal with a £1 or £2 coin the same way I deal with RBS pound notes in Scotland. Or Loonies or CDN$2 coins in Canadia; doesn't feel like real money. Not that the US$ is all that real nowadays.

Besides, if they stop the US$1 or $2 bills we'll have fewer presidents' faces to stare it. Imagine the two lowest note denominations in the US having the pictures of Lincoln and Reagan on them? Oh, the horror.

Any of you guys have an idea of the current likelihood of Britain moving from pounds to euros?

Neil..

The US government simply does not have the courage of its convictions. You guys were forced to embrace decimalization of your currency like it or not. About a decade ago, Brits were forced to endure the loss of £1 bank notes like it or not.

St;udy after study has shown the US Treasury would save quite a bit by getting rid of the $1 bill and substituting a $1 coin; but apparently the old foggies in Congress don't want to do it; just like they don't want to embrace the metric system. If they would just do it; along with a nice thick $1 coin, there would be some grumbling but it would be done and within 2 months nobody would care.

We still have to remember how many pints in a quart etc. The thought that you just have to move a decimal to go from cm. to meters to km., well that would actually make sense except to the old f--rts in the US Congress. And of course, believe it or not, the US still uses the outmoded idiotic Farenheit thermometer scale.

And of course to top off all the confusion, the US gallon is different from the imperial gallon; not that anybody uses gallons anymore outside the US.

Now I am not from Britain and don't profess to speak for Brits in general although I have some good friends who live in Britain.

Having said that, from what I read, most economists believe it is inevitable and to the advantage of the British economy which for better or for worse has tied itself into Europe, that Britain will adopt the Euro. Tony Blair, who is a pretty smart fellow, knows that.

But he also knows there is a great deal of indifference and/or downright hostility on the part of many towards the adoption of the Euro. For one thing, the UK would have to give up a lot of control over decisions regarding taxation and interest rates. My friends joke with me that somehow many Brits would not be able to deal with the thought that the Queen's picture is no longer on the coins or currency and that some members of the older generation feel that giving up the pound would simply be another indication that Britain is no longer a world power.

But the reality is that inevitably Britain will be using the Euro at some point in the future.

A quick (and reasonably accurate) method of converting the GBP to dollars is to double it and subtract 10%.

xyz123 is incorrect when he quotes:
"many Brits would not be able to deal with the thought that the Queen's picture is no longer on the coins or currency".

The Queen or the winning horse of the Grand National could be on the coins: "Each euro coin has a common European design on one side and an individual national design on the other. However, the technical features of the coins (size, weight, metals used) are identical across all euro countries."

http://europa.eu.int/euro/entry.html

Incidentally, I have somewhere a coin about the size of half my little fingernail which I recall is a three penny silver coin.

Speaking of British money... I've seen some old advertisements (WWII era) that say, for example, 50d. What monetary unit is a "d"?

Although it may not have come across that way, I sort of meant my remark about the Queen being on British currency tongue in cheek.

And it is quite true that one side of each Euro coin is left to the individual countries to design. I always enjoy looking at my Euro coins to sort of collect the coins by country of origin...boy will that become interesting when all the new countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland convert to the Euro.

"d" was the abbreviation for (old) pence. You'd never see 50d because there were 12 pence in a Shilling, 20 shillings in a Pound. So 50d would have been shown as 4s 2d or 4/ 2d, as the "/" character was used for Shillings.

Thanks, Gardyloo. I just picked 50 off the top of my head.

I think the "d" derived from a Roman coin called the denarius (sp?).

xyz123, Congress hasn't got enough faith in the American people. You're right, the answer is to bite the bullet - and if they really wanted the $1 coin to be accepted, how do you do it? Simple - withdraw the $1 bill. I remember reading about how the Swedes woke up one morning and had to start driving on the right instead of the left. Compared to that, metrics would have to be a breeze.

RufusTFirefly, I like difference too, but I can get my kicks, such as they are, other ways. If I were a masochist I might feel differently. (Hear about the masochist who enjoyed taking cold showers? So he took warm showers instead...)