7 ms·
Other slang terms (more commonly used in London): - “Nugget” - £1 - “Reds” - £50 (usually only used in the plural e.g. a stack of reds) - “Bill” - £100 - “M
by MrsPeaches 4y ago
Other slang terms (more commonly used in London):
- “Nugget” - £1
- “Reds” - £50 (usually only used in the plural e.g. a stack of reds)
- “Bill” - £100
- “Monkey” - £500
- “Grand” - £1000
- “Bag” - £1000 (from cockney “bag of sand” rhyming with “grand”)
- frobozz 4y ago£5 and its multiples: Lady, Ayrton, Commodore, Score, Pony. Sadly, I think these are dying out due to the move towards a cashless society. The most common use for any of these (for me) was to ask someone to lend me a bit of cash when I'd left my wallet at home.
- corblimeyguvnor 4y agoTranslation - more rhyming slang, although not necessarily 'cockney' Lady Godiva - 'fiver' (£5) Ayton Senna - 'tenner' (£10) - obviously a more modern idiom. I have not come accross a Commodore before so am going to guess because of where it sits in the list as £15 Score - £20 (as in three-score-years-and-10 and all that) Pony - £25 - some latin root in there - that is an old one. I don't think they are dying out, in that paying a pony is still £25 with cash or with a card.
- sbuk 4y agoCommodore - Once, twice, three times a lady...
- denton-scratch 4y agoAs in "Lend me a tenor"?
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoAnd as well as Ton and Pony there's: - "Score" - £20 - "Nicker" - £1 Or if you want to go full cockney "Deep Sea Diver" or "Lady Godiva" £5 (fiver), and "Ayrton Senna" for £10 (tenner)
- simonh 4y agoMy desktop host name is fiver after the character from Watership Down (and it’s a 5k iMac), so the VM I run on it is Godiva.
- finnh 4y agoFunny, mine is "fivek". I bought that machine the first week it was available, I'd been waiting and waiting for a large hires screen so the name fell right out.
- dewclin 4y agoAlso (possibly only amongst bankers in London): - "Yard" - £billion (derived from the french "milliard")
- Symbiote 4y agoMilliard was the standard British word for 1,000,000,000 until some point in the 1970s.
- simonh 4y agoThen there was the British billion, which was a million million. The US version has taken over completely.
- throw0101c 4y agoFrom Numberphile, "How big is a billion?" (2012): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ
- twic 4y agoAlso "buck" and "bar", which I think are one and two million. Not uniquely British, but certainly used here.
- shrubhub 4y agoBorn and bred Londoner, never heard nugget in my life. TIL!
- MrsPeaches 4y agoIt’s a bit outdated tbh, as it was a reference to to gold colour of the pound coin (as shown in the article). To be used as follows: Bredda, set me a nugget. I’ve only got 50p and I’m feeling that Junior Spesh [1] [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6pbZLiLt30 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6pbZLiLt30
- frobozz 4y agoI use(d) it a lot. Specifically for pound coins, rather than the value of £1. e.g. you would ask, "Can you swap us 5 nuggets for a Lady?" If you wanted to go and get something from a vending machine, but only had notes. Even more so than other terms, I think this is being lost to cashlessness.
- makingstuffs 4y agoJacks: fiva: £5
- jdksncnskw 4y agoAlso used to denote weights of certain herbs circa 2000: Jacks: £5 Ben: £10 Henry (I.e 1/8): £20
- makingstuffs 4y ago*the best herbs :))
- beowulfey 4y agoI didn’t realize grand for 1000 was slang. That one made it to the USA too.
- denton-scratch 4y agoI think it probably crossed the atlantic in the other direction; I'm pretty sure that "grand" for a thousand didn't originate here.
- gumby 4y agoAmericans also say “large” for $1000, and “grand” is French for “large” so the travel might have been in the opposite direction.
- wrycoder 4y agoAnyone know what a hundred “large” might mean?
- slowwriter 4y agoI believe it’s a hundred thousand
- blackshaw 4y agoI'm British and have never heard any of these before except "grand".
- dazc 4y agoI always thought Bag of Sand as Scouse, we live and learn?
- denton-scratch 4y agoCockney rhyming slang. The custom is that you take a two-word phrase whose second word rhymes with the target word, and then you just use the first word. So "Plates of meat" == "feet", but you just say "me plates are cold". Scousers don't do that. [Edit] There was a cafe off Haymarket in London, called "My Old China". That was another kind of plate; a "china" is a "china plate", which rhymes with "mate". So it's "my old mate".
- dazc 4y agoAn Archer, £2,000 'A reference to the libel case involving the novelist Jeffrey Archer. The term is slang for the sum of £2,000, a reference to the amount that Archer allegedly offered as a bribe which was the basis of the case.' https://inews.co.uk/light-relief/offbeat/the-most-confusing-slang-words-for-money-and-where-the-terms-come-from-281187 https://inews.co.uk/light-relief/offbeat/the-most-confusing-...
- bradwood 4y agoscore == 20GBP for 50 quid, I've heard "reddies" quite a bit too, but my personal favourite -- an "Ayrton" for 10GBP (rhyming slang: Ayrton Senna -> tenner)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drumhead 4y agoNugget is realtively newish. Never heard of a Red until now, or a bill, a £100 was sometimes called a ton. Monkey comes from Indian currency, I think the 500 rupee had a monkey on it. Never heard of a Bag. A common one in my time was a Jackson for a £5, as in Jackson 5.