American Reacts to British Money

"There is no-one important on the back of a £20 note." Yup - only JMW Turner, Britain's greatest and most prolific painters. Also featured on the note is 'The Fighting Temeraire', one of his most famous paintings. This ship fought at Trafalgar with Nelson in 1805. You may remember James Bond and Q sitting together and discussing the ship in the film 'Skyfall.'

I'm surprised that they didn't mention in the video that the smaller value coins each have part of a jigsaw puzzle on the reverse side. If you lay them together in the correct order, they show the Royal Coat of Arms. I've always thought was kinda cool.

Years ago, you had to pay one penny to use public toilets, that's how "Spending a penny" became a euphemism for needing to pee. The £20 and £50 notes were upgraded last year, so now they are also made of polymer. The highest denomination note in circulation produced by the bank of England is £50, but there are Scottish £100 notes in circulation.

we use the £1 (one pound) coin all the time, because we dont have a £1 note. The £2 coin is fairly new and I think it was introduced to help with vending machines. We have a ton of different names for our money and theres probably a lot of names that are local to different areas of the country, like there are for most things in Britain. Pre 1971 we had different money altogether Pounds, Shillings & Pence. There were 240 pennies to a pound. Pounds were divided into Shillings. A Shilling was worth 12 pennies and was known a a "bob". You then had a 10 Shilling note (10 bob) which was half a quid (pound). Five Shillings was a "Crown" (five shillings was often called a Dollar as I think there were once 4 dollars to a pound, though I could be wrong on that one) The next coin was the Half Crown worth 2 shillings and 6 pence, this was often called a "half a'dollar" Then there was the "2 bob bit" witch was the 2 shilling piece (A "bit" was any single coin) Then it was the Shilling (1 bob) next was the 6 penny piece (for ever known as a "Tanner") Then the 3 penny piece (the "thru'penny bit..... cockney rhyming slang for the shits) Then came the Penny, next it was the half penny ("ha'penny") and lastly the Farthing which was a quarter of a penny.....The old money system was known as LSD (no not that LSD) and was in some ways better than the decimal currency we have now, because being made up of units of 12 meant that it could be divided in more ways than the decimal system of 10 (the pound cannot be divided equally by three as there is no coin worth a third of a penny)........phew! I need a lie down after that

British bank notes also have braille numbers on them. It’s another way of helping the visually impaired to know what bank note they are holding 😊

So the term “to spend a Penny” came from when you had to pay for public bathrooms as it cost a penny in most places (when it started) and the saying has stuck.

You could call a £20 note A Score, and a £50 note A Bullseye. They are commonly called notes here in the UK not bills. Scotland and Northern Ireland issue their own banknotes which are used alongside Engilsh notes.

Fun fact: if you shine a UV light on the correct side of a UK bank note, it shows a number equal to the value of the note - so a fiver shows a 5, a tenner a 10, etc.

Quid is just like "buck" for dollar. You probably wouldn't use it in a formal situation but everyone understands it. Also don't forget that you also use words like "nickel", "dime" and "quarter" for your coins, so you definitely do have slang terms for your money! Coins and notes are all different sizes and shapes so you can identify them by feel - handy for everyone but REALLY useful for people with a vision impairment. We also use the word "note" rather than "bill" - a "bill" is a check in a restaurant, or an invoice. The first Charles III coins have just gone into circulation (50p piece) and they'll gradually replace the rest over the next years or decades. All our currency is in 1/2/5, 10/20/50, and it's easy arithmetic. For example, to make 88p you need 50+20+10+5+2+1. For 88c you'd need 25+25+25+10+1+1+1, right? which is a whole extra coin. We use £2 and £1 coins a lot because we don't have £1 notes any more.

Speaking as someone who enjoys beach metal detecting on a popular tourist beach, I love the £1 and £2 coins. They give a really strong signal even if they're buried quite deep in the sand. A couple of hours of detecting usually turns up enough for a takeaway dinner and a couple of cans of beer. :)

Fun fact: you may have noticed the £ looks like an L, this is because it is for Libra Pondo which was a weight in Roman times, we may use Pound (from Pondo) but the symbol comes from Libra (also why pounds in weight has the symbol "lb"). Libra is of course associated with the scales (see star contilations) as in times gone by, goods and money were weighed to determine value. In case you did not know, the $ comes from the name Spanish Dollar or Peso - because the Spanish dominated the Americas... and it stuck...

The £20 and £50 notes have been updated from paper to polymer notes since they posted this video. The tiered sizing (£5 notes are smaller than £10 notes which are smaller than £20 which are smaller than £50) is there for precisely to help those with vision impairments. The polymer notes also have braille on the corners for the blind (except the £5, but its lack of braille makes it readily distinguishable from the others). They will slowly phase out the current stock of notes with Queen Elizabeth II on them once they start circulating the King Charles III notes and coins sometime in mid-2024.

I’m a 74 year old Briton and I think in my lifetime things have changed to the extent that when I was a child I considered people who remembered the Second World War as old, whereas at my age I realise that I must be old because I remember the pre-decimalisation currency (decimal currency came in in 1971) and I had actually passed the age of 21 when that happened. I still remember the old system of £sd to four places of decimals (my earliest job was in a Cost Office) which is one of the more useless attainments I have. It had 240 old pennies to the pound instead of 100.  What I do distinctly remember is an American tourist being asked on radio at the time what he thought about our changing currency, and his reply was that he found it very confusing! I could never understand why someone from a decimal currency country like the USA would find a decimal currency system confusing! Perhaps you had to be American?

For us older people we also had a half pence coin growing up and a £1 note

Having the different denominations of banknotes in different sizes and colours is very useful. Having all the notes the exact same size and colour like American dollars must create great difficulties for visually impaired people.

Fun fact: I don't know if anyone has mentioned this but before we switched to "plastic" notes they were not made out of "paper" like the woman says in the video they were made of cotton or "cotton paper". Also she say's that pennys and 5p's are made from silver and copper and that also is not true any more.

Fun fact: Originally a pound was the value of one pound in weight of silver.

You'll notice in the comments, we refer to the 'paper' money as notes, not bills.

Sometimes folk (mostly from London) use rhyming slang for their money, for example: A Nicker or an Alan whicker ( a nicker can be substituted for quid) is a pound, a Lady Gerdiver is £5 a Big Ben is £10, a score is £20, a Pony (short form of pony and trap) is 25, a Bullseye is £50, a Ton or Century is £100, a Monkey is £500, a Grand is a £1000, there are many more, but these are the common phrases used. Having no money, we would say I'm Skint or they are Skint, same as broke.

"Spending a penny" comes from the days when public toilets were not free to use. You used to have to pay 1 penny to use them (the door had a coin operated lock). The money used to go towards keeping the toilets clean and in good condition.