L S D

I was reading yet another Lord Peter Wimsey novel one night last week when I came across a reference to old British money: £ s d. The first symbol is of course for the Great British Pound and I vaguely remembered that the 's' stood for 'shillings' but I was thinking the next word should be 'pence' but there was a 'd', not a 'p'. I asked Bill to look it up on his phone and he came up with the fact that the £ symbol originated with the Latin word "Librae" and that this is where we get the abbreviation for a pound (weight) as lb. After that he came up with 's' is for solidi and 'd' is for denarii but that got me no closer to shillings or pence. 

So I scribbled a note to myself and looked it up. Of course it's not very simple, not simple at all. 

According to Wikipedia, while the words to referring to the coinage of course are Latin and therefore to do with the Roman Empire, the definition of the amounts and the relative value between the coins was introduced by Charlemagne. The term Libra comes from the Latin for 'balance' as in balancing scales. This makes sense as Charlemagne decided that his pound weight would be roughly 490 grams, which is what a Libra weighed. The current pound weight in Britain is about 454 grams and no longer has anything to do with the weight of a GBP coin. Charlemagne's system was prevalent throughout Europe until the decimalisations that occurred in the 1700 and 1800s. Except of course for Britain where they didn't change over until 1971. The (new-ish) United States was one of the first countries to change to a decimal system, in 1792.

Under the old system there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings (or 240 pence) in a pound. Somewhere along the line I thought someone told me there were 17 pence in a shilling and when Bill would brag about how good some member of his family was at adding columns of money in his head, I was truly in awe. Multiples of 12 are a little less daunting, but I'm sure most folks are forever grateful for decimalisation (or would be if they thought about it). 

Interestingly, or so I thought, in the middle ages, only denari were actual coins, made of silver. Librae and soldi were just used as accounting terms. Over time (and inflation) in Britain, as elsewhere, other coins began to be minted (guineas, crowns, farthings, half-pennies, etc) but the original terms were still used in accounting.

All well and good, but I still didn't understand how one got from 'soldi' to 'shillings' or 'denarii' to 'pence'. So, back to Europe, in France they called these coins livre, sous and denier. In Italy they were lira, soldo and denaro. In Germany, however, the names were pfund, schilling and pfennig, which gets us closer to the English names.

I was surprised to learn that pence is another plural for penny, in addition to pennies. So all those times I've got confused and called a pence a penny, I was right after all. Or I would have been fifty years ago, as with decimalisation Britain began to say 'one pence'. Oh well.

Since Wikipedia took me no further about these names, I turned to my old friend the etymology dictionary.  To start with, solidi / solidus means 'solid' - as in a solid metal coin. So obvious, right?

Also, the old English scilling comes from "Proto-Germanic". The German term might either come from a word for 'to resound or ring' or possibly from a word 'to cut' as perhaps one might carve a shield, which has similarity to the face of a coin. I'm rather partial to the things being named for the jingle they make in a pocket. The ending 'ing' is a Germanic term for a 'fractional part' (also in farthing), which makes sense given that a shilling was a fraction of a pound.

The word denari is Latin for "containing ten", which sounds great until you remember that there were 12 denari in a solidus. Perhaps there was an earlier decimal system that time has buried? No one else seems bothered about the difference between ten and twelve, so I've no idea.

The etymology of pence is useless so I looked up penny. Tracing the beginnings of that word takes us through middle and old English and Northumbrian p-words to our old friend Proto-Germanic - also Dutch, Danish, Swedish, not to mention Old Saxon and Old Frisian and of course Old Germanic p-words - and finishes by saying, "a word of unknown origin". But it was a fun ride.

On this particular evening when I was asking Bill to explain "£ s d" he turned around and asked where the symbol for USDs - $ - originated. Since I read books, not internet devices before sleeping, I just left him with 'I've no idea.' 

But I looked that up too.