Talk:Cent (currency)

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mentioned?[edit]

Should it be mentioned that the common use in the U.S. and Canada of the term "penny" to refer to the one-cent pieces is inaccurate, the penny only existing in Britain and Ireland (now or formerly)? --Daniel C. Boyer 19:10, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The penny doesn't exist in Ireland anymore (on February 28th 2002 the last of the pennies were taken out of circulation and are now replaced by euro cents) however in the US and Canada they have nicknames for all their coins e.g. dime, quater and a "penny" is 1 cent. --Neal ricketts 22:31, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Legal tender?

Cent sign[edit]

What it says here isn't correct. While "c" may be used to represent "cent", it is not a cent sign per se. Shall I be bold and revise this section? Evertype 20:21, 2004 Dec 31 (UTC)

Can someone add info in the article on how to type the cent symbol on computer keyboards that don't have it? DBlomgren 16:17, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Added. --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 17:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It depends which currency one is dealing with. The US dollar uses a lower case C with a line through it as a symbol, but cents of other currencies such as the Euro and Rand use a plain lower case C.

"Pennies"[edit]

(In the UK and pre-euro Ireland, the name of the 1p coin is also penny, pl. pence.)

But the plural of the coin is "pennies" ("I saw two pennies on the ground")-- "pence" is the plural of the monetary amount ("it costs fifty pence"). 66.92.237.111 20:36, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Source about mints[edit]

I don't believe all the claims about "most mints", "many countries" and such. It seems to me like someone pretty much generalised from the US (and maybe Canadian) situation. RandomP 22:34, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

 Done. I've removed that text. Pburka (talk) 23:13, 7 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Source about the cent sign[edit]

I believe the cent symbol is used almost exclusively in conjunction with the dollar symbol, and in particular is not used for the euro. I might be wrong about that, so I'm asking for sources. RandomP 22:34, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have seen the cent sign in use in handwritten signage in shops in Ireland. Evertype 08:17, 3 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for splitting up my question, it certainly is easier to discuss that way.
I'd like to see a source that says this is the usual state of affairs, though. I believe the usual way of doing this is to write out cent, or use the euro sign with a decimal fraction.
But I could be wrong, and I'm not going to remove your anecdotal evidence to replace it with my own :-)
RandomP 14:08, 3 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The cent sign is seen only very occasionally here in Ireland, just as American English is occasionally seen and heard. The normal usage is a plain "c". Rwxrwxrwx 20:37, 9 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The "cent" sign also serves for the colon sign in Costa Rica, so it's not exclusive to US currency. DBlomgren 16:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, the colón sign ₡ is different. It has 2 slashes. If you can't see it due to font or system problem, see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20A0.pdf. --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 17:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming from Cent (currency) to Cent sign[edit]

Why? This article is not just about the sign, but also about the unit. If you want to standardize naming (xyz sign), then you should fork off a new article. --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 19:40, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Etymology[edit]

Can someone clarify for me why this part is important: "and is related to the Greek εκατόν (hekaton)". I was going to delete it but I thought I'd ask here first. The word centum is also related to virtually every other word for "hundred" in every Indo-European language; don't see how Greek is special here (besides being on the same side of the Centum-Satem isogloss along with rest of Western Europe). cab 03:17, 5 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I may be quibbling here, but the etymology of cent actually goes back to centesimum (only one 's'), a hundredth, and centesimum goes back to centum. 216.99.219.151 (talk) 06:42, 3 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

1 cent coin relative sizes[edit]

The juxtaposition of the images of the US penny and Euro cent makes it look like the penny is almost twice the size of the euro cent:
File:Euro 1cent.png
It would be better if the images were scaled appropriately to represent their true relative sizes. Pimlottc 13:39, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Usage[edit]

I don't understand the inclusion of New Taiwan dollar in the "Usage" section. The smallest common unit in Taiwan is the dollar. Even prior to recent times the smallest unit was the 1/2 dollar to my understanding. I don't know of any time when there were pennies or cents in usage in Taiwan. I would recommend removing this link unless a case can be made to retain it. --DRead (talk) 01:36, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yen?[edit]

The Yen hasn't been divided into 100 sen (or 1 000 rin for that matter) since 1953. Consequently I have removed this from the "Usage" section. Dazcha (talk) 14:41, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The yen is still split into 100 sen, but it is not possible to use any units less than 1 yen for paying anything. The sen is seen at several places, for example when specifyingwiki currency exchange rates. And when I lived in Japan, my electricity bill listed the prices in sen, although the sum of all fees was rounded off to the nearest yen. For an actual example, see [1] where the contents of various fields in the "Financial Information" section are rounded off to the nearest sen (instead of yen). (212.247.11.156 (talk) 23:50, 22 January 2010 (UTC))[reply]

History of the stroke mark on the cent[edit]

How far back does the vertical stroke on the cent sign go?

Was it ever a horizontal stroke? 216.99.219.151 (talk) 06:38, 3 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Section: "Examples of currencies which do feature cents under another (local) name"[edit]

The subtitle suggests that these currencies actually use cents, but by some local quirk or affectation people choose to call them something else. This is utterly assinine, akin to suggesting for example that the US Dollar is actually divided into 100 kopeks, but for some reason those silly Americans insist on calling their kopeks "cents". Some currency units, such as various national flavours of Dollar, or the Euro, are divided into cents. Others are not. Sterling is divided into pence, the Rouble is divided into kopeks, etc. These units are NOT cents.

Perhaps the list is aiming to to exemplify some currencies that have a centesimal (1/100) unit that is not called cent. I would change the title accordingly but I must question the need for this list (and the others) in the first place, since all but a few countries in the world have a currency with centesimal units, and the name of the unit is obviously going to vary from one to the next.

I would suggest the end of this article needs to be reworked to remove the cultural bias.

86.178.61.11 (talk) 11:07, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've changed the list headings to remove the cultural bias, but I do question the need for the lists at all. Decimal currencies are the norm, a list showing currencies that use 1/100 fractional values is pointless since it is (virtually) all of them. What is of interest of currencies that do not. If there are no objections posted here I will revisit the article in the near and future and bodly edit...
I've also reworded the sentence on the pre-decimal British currency. It wasn't divided into shillings or pence, it was divided into shillings and pence. A minor semantic difference, but an important one! Petecollier (talk) 14:26, 31 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cent sign popularity[edit]

A number of Internet sites talk about the cent sign as something that is today extremely rare compared with how common it was for most of the twentieth century. This article makes no reference to any version of this statement. Any suggestions on what to put in the article?? Georgia guy (talk) 20:37, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Best answer: you write it, using the sources you name. How about that! -DePiep (talk) 23:28, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

¢ vs. "cent"[edit]

This article is mostly about the concept of "cent" with nothing more than a line or two here and there about the symbol iself and its usage.

I got here through a link from the page about $, which does not delve into - except perhaps topically - the concept of "dollar", but rather the symbol itself is the main focus.

I was expecting this page to specifically deal with ¢, not the concept of "cent ...thus, history, origins, myths, usage, etc. should such a page exist separately for "¢" and "cent", as is the situation with "$" and "dollar"?

66.176.113.94 (talk) 18:43, 6 August 2013 (UTC)Tom in Florida[reply]

split discussion[edit]

Australian 1-cent[edit]

The Australian (ex-)one-cent coin isn't mentioned in the 'Usage' section whereas the now extinct Canadian one-cent coin is.

Will the Canadian entry be removed soon or will a 'Currencies that used to have centesimal units/one cent coins' list be added (or should I just be quiet and stop complaining! ;P)?


Yoyosamo (talk) 08:19, 25 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Misuse with decimal[edit]

Does anyone have a source that goes into the common mistake of using the cent sign with a decimal? (Example: 0.02¢) I see this in many of the same places that I see greengrocer's apostrophes. They get upset when I point out to them that they have marked their goods at a price less than one penny. --Khajidha (talk) 12:15, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

China[edit]

Not for nothing, but (a) the PRC's fen can be called cents in translation, (b) the ROC's "New Taiwan Dollar" are actually yuan divided into fen that do just get called dollars and cents in translation, and (c) the Old Taiwan Dollar and the Chinese Customs Gold Units were also yuan and fen that got called cents in translation. Our article on the Chinese Gold Yuan is the only one to claim actual division into cents, but it's unsourced on the subject and almost certainly wrong. The gold yuan was actually only divided into jiao (tenths, dimes) and if it was even notionally divisible into hundreds, those units would've officially been fen too. — LlywelynII 00:05, 13 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 17 June 2022[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Neither examining long-term significance nor usage seem to yield conclusive evidence for picking a primary topic. (closed by non-admin page mover)Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 06:11, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]


– Obvious primary topic. The other topics are specific coins (which wouldn't be primary over this article because this article is about the general topic), a part of a specific city, an Old English name of a city, and a few units of measurement, none of which get anywhere near as many views as this page. (I wanted to link the page view comparison here, but I could only get the link for the views of one page, so if you want to see it, you'll have to enter the page names yourself.) Evil Sith Lord (talk) 05:34, 17 June 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 16:00, 24 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support per nom. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 07:31, 17 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom. Showiecz (talk) 10:19, 17 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Cent (music) is an equivalent primary topic, there is WP:NOPRIMARY for this term. In 2020 and 2021 their pageviews were nearly equal, although more recently they diverged a bit, still not enough to mark the currency as obvious primary topic. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ () 15:46, 17 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Can you explain how, when the average pageviews of cent (currency) have been double – recently treble – those for cent (music), you can conclude that they are "nearly equal"? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:48, 17 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Looking at pageviews from 2019 to present, there are times in 2020 when cent (area) matched or surpassed cent (currency) (and when cent (music) is added in, they significantly surpassed the currency). However, around July of last year, there was a large drop off in views of Cent (area), along with a less dramatic but still significant increase in the currency's views. Can anyone explain this, and is the trend likely to continue? Station1 (talk) 08:21, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    That's odd. I just looked through the articles trying to figure out what happened there, and I can't know for sure, but this is my best guess of what happened: Cent (area) only has 7 incoming links. It seems incredibly unlikely that a page with so few links could be that popular, so I assume that it probably used to be linked from many pages and was clicked on by people who were unfamiliar with or curious about the unit. Around July and August 2021, someone probably mass replaced measurements of area that were recorded in cents with measurements in other units, removing almost all of the incoming links and thus most of the traffic. I assume that the traffic would not increase to that extent again unless someone re-adds a bunch of measurements of area in cents.
As for Cent (music), the graph shows that it has, in general, consistently had fewer page views than Cent (currency). They got pretty close around April 2020-July 2021, but save for the one huge spike in the music article (I assume that someone relatively popular probably mentioned it on that day and several of their fans looked it up.), the currency article has always been more popular. However, I cannot explain why the currency article had a sudden increase in popularity in July, but it does not seem to be related to the mass-unlinking of the area article. I can't seem to find any evidence that it had been linked to from a very popular article in July, so it seems like the only explanation is just that more people have started searching for it or clicking links to it.
Finally, I didn't mention this in the nomination because I didn't want it to be excessively long if there would be no opposition, but the currency really does have more worldwide significance than the other two. Based on the list in the article, cents or very similar units are used or used to be used for 42 different currencies around the world. The unit of area does not have comparable worldwide significance because according to the article, it is only used in some parts of southern India. As for the music article, I literally know nothing about music so please feel free to correct me if my judgements are incorrect, but it looks like it's probably a pretty specialized thing (something that not just anyone with an interest in music would know about, or at least not what would instantly come to the head of anyone with an interest in music when they hear the word "cent"). Also, the article says that a cent is a hundredth of a "semitone", and the article on semitones says that semitones are the "smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music", which I take to mean that cents are not commonly used in "western tonal music".
I'm so sorry about the long reply, but hopefully I cleared up a few things. Evil Sith Lord (talk) 09:53, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This is getting far too much into overanalysis and missing the point. Just having "more views" is not grounds to make something the primary topic if it is not vastly more to the point that it is highly unlikely people are going to look for anything else. That is simply not the case with the currency vs. music topics and never will be. While the currency topic is overall more popular, it is not popular or significant by a wide enough margin to be the obvious WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, and therefore this nomination is misleading. See also WP:NWFCTM as you have clearly confessed you know nothing with regards to music. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ () 14:16, 19 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If a topic has more views than another topic, assuming they are significant and consistent, as well as more than all other topics combined, that is grounds to recognize it as primary. I would say the currency is primary when viewed against the musical topic alone, but it's the other uses on the dab page that make me uncertain. Station1 (talk) 18:35, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nominator. JIP | Talk 20:44, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak oppose some of the uses in the "Measurement" section also have long-term significance. Crouch, Swale (talk) 21:27, 21 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 05:10, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per more long-term significance Red Slash 17:06, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. This is definitely a sensible proposal, as the currency is clearly a lot more widely known (I hadn't heard of the music term and was surprised at how popular its article is). However, usage on Wikipedia suggests there isn't a primary topic. See the Wikinav for the dab page: in May, the link to the currency got 235 clicks. The total views of the dab for the same period are three times as big at 740 [2]. If you exclude dead-end navigations as well as clicks for the other coins (Cent (currency) arguably subsumes them all as a broad-concept article) and compare only with the outgoing traffic for Cent (music) (82) and Kent (19), then you'd arrive at the maximum possible estimate for the proportion of readers who seek the currency article, which is 70%: pretty high, but not high enough to indicate a primary topic. – Uanfala (talk) 22:13, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Per Uanfala's wikinav stats, the currency gets 70% of the clicks. That meets WP:PRIMARYTOPIC with respect of usage: it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term. For long-term significance, it is at least as significant as the other articles. Vpab15 (talk) 15:00, 10 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    70% is only the maximal value, which is arrived at by excluding several entries. You'll get a much lower percentage if you use another relevant metric: the ratio of the clicks for this article to the total views of the dab page, which is 235/740 = 32%. – Uanfala (talk) 23:42, 10 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.