I know that “s.” refers to “shillings” and “d.” to “pennies”, and I believe that “6d.” is “sixpence”.
Anyone?
If you have a source, all the better!
Perhaps of note that the pronunciations of some penny amounts are not intuitive, e.g.
- 2d = tuppence
- 3d = thruppence
In all cases, the ‘pence’ is commonly squished together so it sounds more like ‘pns’ (like in comeuppance).
6½d. Would be 6.5 pence, or sixpence and hap’ne (halfpenny). 6s. 6d. Would be 6 shillings and sixpence, or 6 and 6.
Source: my parents and grandparents are/were English (Birmingham and Warwick) and I heard stories when I was growing up, as well as a couple of texts and TV shows. Sketchy sources, yes, but hopefully gets you started! Also, I’m probably wrong.
Yup, as long as 6.5 is pronounced “six and a half” because “six point five” is too modern for old money.
Edit: and ha’penny is pronounced HAYP-nee /h ɛ́j p n ɪj/
“sixpence ha’penny” would also be acceptable, if not preferable.
Source: My parents also remember pre-decimal money and I’ve heard plenty of tales.
One good story is how, on decimal day, a lot of prices went up to 240% of the original because shopkeepers simply changed the d to a p on their price labels. One old penny was 1/240 of a pound and a new penny was 1/100.
The e is silent? Did Wakko Warner lie to me all those years ago?
The abbreviations come from Roman times, popular currency in Rome were librae, solidi, and denarii.
There were 12 denarii in a solidus, and 20 solidi (or 240 denarii) in a Libra
In pre decimal British currency they kept the latin abbreviations, but denarii became pence, solidi became shillings and librae became pounds (and this is why the £ symbol for pounds looks kind of like an L)
And over the years at different times currency was issued in various fractions and combinations of those, such as quarter penny (farthings) and half pennies
This sounds like it also partially explains why a sixteen penny nail is written 16d. But not why pennies are somehow used to describe nail sizes.
Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link
But for those who won’t click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that’s what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.
While we’re on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge
Basically it’s an arbitrary standard because it’s what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there’s diff6 “gauge” measurements in use in various places for different things)
But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire
The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it’s 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger
Then there’s shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it’s what it is. It’s the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.
So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.
For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you’d need 20 balls that size to make a pound.
And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.
And I’m not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it’s not interesting (to me at least) but because I’ve run out of fucks.
Wikipedia has a few examples of the different ways you could say those amounts out loud here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/£sd#Writing_conventions_and_pronunciations
