KBC 14: What is the official currency of the United Kingdom?

KBC 14: What is the official currency of the United Kingdom?

Options:

A) Pound Sterling

B) Dollar

C) Euro

D) Paise

Answer: Pound Sterling

The pound Sterling is the official currency of the United Kingdom. 

The pound is the main unit of sterling and is popularly referred to as pound sterling. One pound is subdivided into 100 pence.

Sterling is the world’s oldest currency that is still in use and that has been in continuous use since its inception. It is currently the fourth most-traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar, the Euro, and the Japanese Yen.

Sterling is also the currency in these territories: Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, the British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha.

 As of mid-2021, sterling is also the fourth most-held reserve currency in global reserves. 

Sterling is the name of the currency as a whole while “pound” and “penny” are the units of account.

There are various theories regarding the origin of the word “sterling”. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the etymology is a derivation from the Old English steorra for star with the suffix “ing”.

Pound sterling, the basic monetary unit of Great Britain. The term is derived from the fact that, about 775, silver coins known as “sterlings” were issued in the Saxon kingdoms, 240 of them being minted from a pound of silver, the weight of which was probably about equal to the later troy pound. Large payments came to be known as “pounds of sterlings,” a phrase later shortened to “pounds sterling.” After the Norman Conquest the pound was divided for accounting purposes into 20 shillings and into 240 pennies, or pence. In medieval Latin documents the words libra, solidus, and denarius were used to denote the pound, shilling, and penny, which gave rise to the use of the symbols £, s and d.

On February 15, 1971, the pound sterling was officially decimalized into 100 new pence. The symbol £ was retained for the pound sterling, and the letter p was chosen for the new penny.

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