I should also point out that "cent" is not used as a slang word for "penny", either. The only difficulty arises is when people particularly people from North America are ambiguous about whether they are talking about American coins or not. Using the word "penny" in the "North American" parts of this forum Classic and Modern US coins , and the Canadian section causes no ambiguity; if you say "I've got a penny" in the US subforums, everyone there knows you're talking about a Lincoln cent dated However, in the "International" subforums of CCF including right here in the "Main forum", that statement is ambiguous.
Do you mean a British penny, an Australian penny, a South African penny We can't tell, and would need to ask for further clarification or even worse give you wrong information, like answering "Wow, a penny is extremely rare and valuable".
That would be true, if you were talking about an Australian penny. But not a British penny, or a US cent. It always amuses me when I hear Americans say they've found an Australian or British "large cent". Britain has never issued "cents", and Australia has never issued "large" ones. The coins are "pennies", and they say so quite clearly on the coins themselves. Apparently, some Americans have been reading the word "cent" and saying "penny" for so long, the words have become interchangeable in their heads, so that when they see the word "penny" on a coin, they say "cent".
Lewis Report this Post to the Staff. Bryan Moderator United States Posts. I think not long ago someone asked what the most repeditive subjects about coins came up. I think this one was missed. Probably on the top ten. Unfortunately somehow coin forums finds those last 10 holdouts. They are each worth different amounts of money and have different physical traits you can use to tell them apart through touch. The value of each coin is: A penny is worth 1 cent. A nickel is worth 5 cents.
A dime is worth 10 cents. A quarter is worth 25 cents. How to tell coins apart without looking: Size from smallest to largest is dime, penny, nickel, and quarter. Nickels are the thickest of the 4 coins. To a British speaker, pennies are those small copper coloured coins. Sean - I disagree with "We don't have pennies" aspect. In the UK "penny" is the name of a coin and a value. If you have 3 penny coins and 1 two-penny coin, you have 3 pennies, but 5 pence.
Show 1 more comment. Tristan Tristan 1, 7 7 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. Unofficial in what sense? No, J. Cent is a monetary unit, not the name of a coin. Something that costs 5 cents can be paid for with a nickel or with five pennies. Neither term is more or less official than the other; they merely mean different things. Martha Unofficial in the sense that the government doesn't call it that. Martha, it's unofficial because the USA doesn't use coins with the word penny written on them.
It does use coins with the words one cent. Despite this, many Americans still refer to one cent coins as pennies. While some numismatists might prefer "Lincoln cent", most people call them pennies. So do collector websites , news bloggers , and NPR. Even the US Mint admits they are called "pennies" every now and then albeit parenthetically. Lincoln cent may be the more official name for the coin, but I'd hardly call the word penny "unofficial".
This fruit costs 95 pennies. That seems very odd to me. I would be surprised if many any? Like Hildy says, a penny is a coin, a cent is a value 1 of which is the value of a penny. Who wrote that definition? I have 95 pennies in my pocket. However many coins I have add up to 95 cents. I could have as few as 4 and as many as 95 coins. It's worth noting that "cent" is Latin in origin, related to the word for one hundred, while "penny" is Germanic, related to German "Pfennig" and Dutch "penning" which origins are of more obscure meaning.
I suspect when the US Founding Fathers were setting up the currency system in the late 18th century, they wanted to distance themselves from the English, so they might have gone with the French. I could be wrong. Thomas Jefferson was something of a philologist a student of the history of language and he probably would have known the difference.
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