pennies

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of penny.

   The fountain was littered with pennies tossed in for luck.

   He sorted the pennies by the year they were minted.

   Note

   Here the coins are counted one by one: a jar of them, a fountain floor covered in them. British English keeps a second plural, pence, for a sum of money rather than the coins themselves. Fifty pence is a price, and fifty pennies is a handful of copper. The spelling follows the ordinary rule for nouns that end in a consonant plus y.

2. 2
   noun

   A very small sum of money, with no exact amount given.

   The investors acquired the failing firm for pennies on the dollar.

   He picked up the rare first edition for pennies at a charity stall.

   Similarpeanuts, nothing

   Oppositefortune

   Note

   Only the plural carries this meaning, because the amount is deliberately vague and never a real count of coins. It grows out of the coin plural and sits most naturally after words of cost or price, as in costs pennies per day or bought for pennies. There it stresses how little was paid next to what was gained.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of penny.

   Every finals week, someone in the dorm pennies a door shut as a prank.

   When the breaker keeps tripping, he pennies the old fuse box instead of calling an electrician, which is how house fires start.

   Note

   The verb shares its spelling with the coin plural, and only the sentence tells them apart: he pennies the door is a verb, while a jar of pennies is a noun. Every use is built on the coin itself. People penny a door shut as a slang prank, bridge a fuse socket as a dangerous shortcut, or drop a penny into someone's drink at Oxford crewdates and Cambridge swaps.

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