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Anonymous Posted 16 years ago
Vocabulary

The penny has dropped

In CJ Samsom's book SOVEREIGN, a character uses the phrase ' the penny has dropped'. At first I found this 'out of period'.
The dictionaries made reference to the phrases origin being linked to Victorien arcade machines.
I wondered if it has more to do with Pennyweights / Pfennig
and trading with the 'Germans'
in the period of Henry VIII.
Can anyone help?
  

Top answer

I much prefer the Victorian arcade scenario. From The Phrase Finder (which I find rather authoritative): "The Oxford English Dictionary states that this phrase originated by way of allusion to the mechanism of penny-in-the-slot machines. " The image of someone waiting for a penny-in-the-slot mechanism (which often jammed) to operate does sound plausible and, if that isn't the origin, it is difficult to image what is.

— Mister Micawber

  • I much prefer the Victorian arcade scenario.
  • From The Phrase Finder (which I find rather authoritative): "The Oxford English Dictionary states that this phrase originated by way of allusion to the mechanism of penny-in-the-slot machines.
  • " The image of someone waiting for a penny-in-the-slot mechanism (which often jammed) to operate does sound plausible and, if that isn't the origin, it is difficult to image what is.
  • The usage is surely earlier than 1951 though.
  • Public toilets still then required users to 'spend a penny' in order to unlock the door to get in but, even counting those, coin operated machines were much less common than they were in Victorian times"
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4 Answers
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I much prefer the Victorian arcade scenario. From The Phrase Finder (which I find rather authoritative):

"The Oxford English Dictionary states that this phrase originated by way of allusion to the mechanism of penny-in-the-slot machines. The OED's earliest citation of a use of the phrase, in Nigel Balchin's novel A Way through Wood, 1951:

"I sat and tho
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A plausible answer discussed at a conference attended by top brass scientists some years back. The human mind has four states and Einstein experimented with the state of the mind and discovered that the state of mind as you fall into a sleep is most creative in problem solving. Hence he would think hard about a problem for many hours whilst sitting on a chair with a notebook on his lap and his f
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I believe the arcade machines referred to by the phrase "then the penny dropped" were the old Kinetoscope or Mutascope movie machines of the late 1800s-early 1900s. A person would look into the viewscreen which would be completely blank until the coin was dropped into the slot and the movie began. The allusion being that once the coin dropped and the mechanism activated, all became clear (or visib
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