Pennies

How to spell pennies

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pennies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pennies mean?

1. nounMore than one penny coin, counted as separate physical pieces.

Pennies in a sentence

• She emptied a jar of pennies onto the kitchen table to count them.

• A few stray pennies rolled under the sofa when the jar tipped over.

Where does pennies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of penny, which descends from the Old English penig, also written pening, the name of a small silver coin used across early medieval England. The word is Germanic and has close cousins in other languages, such as the German Pfennig and the Dutch penning, all probably built on the same ancient root, though the ultimate source is uncertain. English keeps two plurals for historical reasons: pennies refers to a number of individual coins, while pence refers to a sum or value of money, a distinction that survives clearly in British usage. The spelling pennies follows the regular English rule that a noun ending in a consonant plus y changes the y to i before adding -es, just like baby becoming babies. The doubled n is a leftover of the short, stressed vowel in the original word and is the part writers most often get wrong.

How the word is built

• penny (Old English penig)
• -ies (plural of nouns ending in -y, where y becomes i)