Is a guinea still used in modern day british currency? And what is a bob?

Question

I was watching some old British drama on the BBC, and I would like to understand some of the terms.

Answer 1

Guinea was, and still is mainly used at auctions. ! guinea equalled 1 pound and one shilling (1.05), this included the auctioneers commission.  Still widely used in horse auctions - so, a horse sold for 10,000 guineas, 10,000 pounds goes to the seller, 500 to the auctioneer.

A bob is just slang for a shilling which is a twentieth of a pound (5p).  So equivelant to the American nickel

Answer 2

in our old currency we had 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound ... my kids always look at me in amazement when I tell them this because they were born when everything had gone decimal ... we had lots of slang names for different coins which have disappeared with the new decimal coins

we had a thruppeny bit, which was three pence (a quarter of a shilling)

a tanner was sixpence (half a shilling)

a bob was a shilling

a florin was two shillings

two shillings and sixpence was "half a crown"

there was a crown, equivalent to five shillings, but in my days there wasn't a crown coin in circulation, although they did mint some for special occasions like the queen's coronation, people bought them mostly as keepsakes

after that everything was paper notes ... 10 shillings, a pound etc

there was also a very old coin called a farthing which was a quarter of a penny (as in the name of the bicycle, penny farthing, so named because it looked like a  farthing next to a penny)

and a halfpenny too ... pronounced hay-penny or happenny

after decimalisation most of these coins disappeared immediately ... the only ones that stuck around for a bit were the ones that had direct equivalents in the decimal currency ... so for instance the shilling was equivalent to 5 new pence, and the florin to 10 new pence, so those coins were around for a few years until they re-designed the coinage to smaller coins

another thing that comes up in programmes on TV sometimes is the Cockney rhyming slang for money ... they talk of a "pony" and so on, but unfortunately I'm not a cockney and can never remember what they mean

Answer 3

In the old UK monetary system, there were 12 pennies to a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound.

A "bob" was slang for a shilling. A "guinea" meant one pound, one shilling. Other terms were florin (two shilling coin), "thruppence" or "thruppenny bit" (three penny coin), "tanner" or "sixpence" (six penny coin), crown (five shilling coin), half crown (two and a half shilling coin), "ha'penny" (half penny coin) and farthing (quarter penny coin).

An older term is groat (four penny coin), however the groat was last minted circa 1855 and wasn't commonly seen in circulation after about 1900. Groats are given out by the Queen to this day in the Maundy ceremony.

This was all done away with when the currency was decimalised in 1971. From 1971 onwards, there were 100 new pence in a pound, and the old shilling became five pence.

Answer 4

A pony is £25, a score is £20, a monkey is £500.