half a grunter
Obsolete British slang for a sixpence — one of those wonderfully strange old money terms where the coin's value gets coded in animal metaphors.
Definitions
Obsolete British slang for a sixpence — one of those wonderfully strange old money terms where the coin's value gets coded in animal metaphors. A 'grunter' referred to a shilling (a pig makes a grunting sound, a pig = a shilling), so half a grunter naturally became a sixpence. Old British slang for money had a whole zoo's worth of animal references.
Back then you could get a decent meal for half a grunter if you knew where to go.
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(UK, slang, obsolete) A sixpence.
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- grunter74%
(slang) A pig.
- grunter65%
One who grunts.
- grunter65%
Any of a group of fish of the family , which make a grunting sound when caught.
- sow's baby65%
A delightfully obscure piece of old British slang for a sixpence — the small silver coin worth six old pennies that circulated until decimalisation in 1971. The origin of the phrase is debated, but it fits into a long tradition of British rhyming and whimsical slang for coins. A sow's baby might have been humorous shorthand born from the pig's associations with small, round, pink things — though the exact logic of Victorian and Georgian slang rarely needs to be airtight to stick.