Other forms: pennies
A penny is a British coin worth one hundredth of a pound. Copper-coloured, and increasingly pointless.
The plural is pence when you mean an amount and pennies when you mean the coins themselves, which is a distinction worth knowing. Before 1971 there were 240 pennies to the pound, which is why older people still occasionally say tuppence. The word carries a great deal of idiom: the penny dropped means somebody finally understood, spending a penny is a coy phrase for going to the lavatory, and something costing a pretty penny is expensive.
1nounpennyA British coin worth one hundredth of a pound.
“He counted out the last few pennies.”
Penny goes back through Old English peniġ to Proto-Germanic panningaz, and nobody has established where it came from before that. It is the same coin as the German pfennig.
Middle English
peny
English, today
penny
Built from
From Middle English peny. From Middle English peny, from Old English peniġ, penniġ, penning (“penny”), from Proto-West Germanic panning, from Proto-Germanic panningaz, of uncertain origin (see that page for theories). a doublet of pfennig and fening.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA