£sd slashes and dashes

[Prosit]

Which reminds me. I always intended to ask.  What does the slash and dash mean?
Is that 4S 6p? or something like that?
Dale

Not a good name for a pub (and the denomination is too high anyway) and Birmingham is no place to pick hop or fruit. A market token, maybe? It is brass, 5.5 grams and 25.4 - 27.2 mm.

Peter

[FosseWay]

Which reminds me. I always intended to ask.  What does the slash and dash mean?
Is that 4S 6p? or something like that?
Dale

It means 4 shillings.

There were two standard ways of writing £sd numerically. One was to use the abbreviations, so e.g. 2s 6d for half a crown. In this case it was usual to omit the pence altogether if they were zero, unless in book-keeping where you needed to put something in the column or if there was a fraction of a penny present (2s 0½d). The other was to use a slash between shillings and pence, with no abbreviation for the denomination, e.g. 2/6. In this case if there were no pence you would write a dash, as here, 4/-.

This token is slightly non-standard for including the s as well. This is a bit like the shopkeepers who price things at £1.99p today -- the p is redundant.

[Prosit]

Thanks! 
Sometime the most obvious stuff most of y'all seem to understand without even thinking about it is confusing to us foreigners.
Dale

It means 4 shillings.

There were two standard ways of writing £sd numerically. One was to use the abbreviations, so e.g. 2s 6d for half a crown. In this case it was usual to omit the pence altogether if they were zero, unless in book-keeping where you needed to put something in the column or if there was a fraction of a penny present (2s 0½d). The other was to use a slash between shillings and pence, with no abbreviation for the denomination, e.g. 2/6. In this case if there were no pence you would write a dash, as here, 4/-.

This token is slightly non-standard for including the s as well. This is a bit like the shopkeepers who price things at £1.99p today -- the p is redundant.

[malj1]

Thanks! 
Sometime the most obvious stuff most of y'all seem to understand without even thinking about it is confusing to us foreigners.
Dale

Like you folks talking of pennies - when you don't have any!


GlOVER & BURLEY were a company selling fruit, vegetables and greengrocery in Birmingham Market.  The Glover & Burley Building is located directly opposite to the Birmingham market.

[Prosit]

We are partly consistent. We don't have any Nickels or Dimes either.
Dale

Like you folks talking of pennies - when you don't have any!
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[Figleaf]

So what do you nickel-and-dime with?

Peter

[Prosit]

It may sound like a paradox but you can't nickel and dime anything, that is the perogorative of "them".  They do it to us. 
Dale

So what do you nickel-and-dime with?

Peter

[Prosit]

So 5/- is 5 Shilling 0d?
Dale

I have an oblong 5/- piece for Glover and Burley Ltd Birmingham and a earlier 1/6 from Walter Glover possibly he was a forerunner to the company.

[malj1]

5/- is 5 Shillings and zero pence. ...five bob.

Just by way of confusing you even more 1/6 - one shilling and sixpence - was commonly called eighteen pence.

[Prosit]

1/6 - (as well as 18d or 18p) are some I have seen which led me to believe there was something I didn't understand.  I was correct. 
Dale

5/- is 5 Shillings and zero pence. ...five bob.

Just by way of confusing you even more 1/6 - one shilling and sixpence - was commonly called eighteen pence.

[malj1]

1/6 - (as well as 18d or 18p) are some I have seen which led me to believe there was something I didn't understand.  I was correct. 
Dale

Now that 18p really hits the fan. 

18d = 1/6 or seven and a half pence in the new money - so 18p is about 3/7 by my calculations! or maybe 3/8; rounding down or rounding up is the problem.

[Prosit]

Likely the 18p is used by the same people types that sell USA pennies 
Dale

Now that 18p really hits the fan. 

18d = 1/6 or seven and a half pence in the new money - so 18p is about 3/7 by my calculations! or maybe 3/8; rounding down or rounding up is the problem.

[FosseWay]

In the British (and AFAIK Australian, NZ and South African) context, p was never used as an abbreviation for pence before decimalisation. In the three last-named countries, it still isn't, obviously. In Britain, p came to be used as the abbreviation for decimal pence after 1971 -- but remember that the pound stayed the same value, so a decimal penny is worth 2.4 predecimal ones.

However, usage in Ireland (I mean the political entity which is now the Republic) was slightly different. Predecimal Irish stamps universally had p after the digit (as an abbreviation of the Irish pingin). On the coins, the Irish denomination was given in words, and the numerical in English, so they used d. All rather confusing in retrospect, though there was no reason for it to seem odd at the time. After 1971, Irish stamps had no unit abbreviation to denote pence, just a numeral, right through to 2002 when c was introduced for cents. But Irish decimal coins all had p after the number... Go figure!

[<k>]

"1/6" can also be rendered as "1s 6d" - but never "1s 6p", because "p" is decimal, "d" is predecimal. And you could say either "one and six" or "a shilling and sixpence". 

People used to stress the number in "SIXp'nce" (saying "pence" almost as "punce"), but in decimal days we now stress the PENCE. That's because, when decimal came, we started off saying "six new PENCE", instead of "SIX-punce". (Sixpence became 2½p in new money, of course, but I'm just talking pronunciation here). Then when we started leaving out the "new", we still stressed the "PENCE". So the stress moved with decimalisation, which changed the way we pronounced the sub-pound denominations.

[villa66]

We are partly consistent. We don't have any Nickels or Dimes either.
Dale

?

v.