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Message:: [QUOTE="Numbers, post: 990606, member: 11668"]Coin World had an article about this some months ago....  I haven't got it in front of me, but if I remember correctly, it goes back to the post-colonial era when each state set its own official exchange rates for all of the various foreign coins that were floating around.  In New York, the British penny had its value set at exactly one cent, in the new dollars-and-cents system that the Congress had adopted.  Since "penny" was a familiar term and "cent" was new and unfamiliar, the result was that the public started calling the cents pennies, rather than calling the pennies cents. Other states adopted slightly different standards--some of them valued the British penny at 1/90 of a dollar, if I remember correctly.  But the New York standard spread to the surrounding states, and with it, the habit of calling a cent a "penny".  And long after U.S. coinage replaced all of the foreign stuff, the term has stuck. With over 200 years of history behind the usage, the article concluded, we can't very well claim that it's *wrong* to use the word "penny" for a one-cent coin--it's merely nontechnical.  So, we should probably quit going around trying to make everyone stop doing it....  <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie11" alt=":rolleyes:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]