Talk:Guinea (coin)

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I don't think the practice of quoting prices in guineas completely disappeared with decimalisation. I was billed in guineas by a surgeon in Scotland in 1982. --scruss 22:44, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What little Napoleon or tabloid journalist says "25 millimetres" was the diameter of the coin over 120 years before the Metric System? Looks like they'd reference it to the inch. Use either an exact measurement or state that it's an approximation for the immeasurate. --Sobolewski 18:41, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Official name?
this article mentions several times that "guinea" was not an official name for the coins described here. was there a single official name for the guineas produced under the various monarchs, or did the name vary? jchristopher 10:27, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Great question! Anyone? Chris 05:10, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I was just about to ask the same thing; what was the coin called officially? The article states that the name is derived from the origin of the gold used to make the coin which increased in price "during the reign of Charles II". If Charlie 2 died in 1685 then there is a 22 year period where the name "Guinea" came about. But what was it called in the intervening period?

Further to that, why was it even commissioned in the first place? Was there some pressing need for high-denomination coinage or was it simply an exercise in royal vanity?

Random Dude. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.242.175.79 (talk) 04:38, 21 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Twelve whole years later on, I've come to the talk page to ask the exact same thing only to find the topic ready-crafted, and it seems there's been no change in the intervening period. Can we find a friendly numismatist to point and fire at the issue sometime before the century is out? 146.199.60.36 (talk) 18:26, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Pretty sure -- tho I have not found specific evidence -- that the coin was meant to just be a gold equivalent of the existing silver pound coin, more compact, lighter, and perhaps more durable. Then the fluctuating price of gold immediately caused a rift between a silver pound sterling (!) and a gold pound...ummm... sterling? and thus the colloquial name for the gold ones became canonical. Sedaya boroda (talk) 03:05, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Going off the topic of the question but I don't know of any silver pound coin. The simple reason is that it would be huge and heavy, literally a (Troy) pound weight of silver. -𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 08:47, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Addition?
My teacher (who is in fact british) says that the guinea was only used by the upper classes. Should this be added, or do I need to find a book or website reference that claims the same thing? Yugiohguy1 (talk) 16:51, 4 April 2008 (UTC) The guinea was not one pound sterning. A guinea was worth 21 shillings. A pound was worth twenty shillings. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.34.133.143 (talk) 19:19, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
 * No, furniture and household fittings (and more expensive electrical goods) were always sold in guineas to everyone, even beyond decimilisasion in the 70s, and not just the upper classes. And legal and medical fees were charged in them, again to all classes. It was nothing but an  attempt to make bills sound lower, to cheat the customers.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.237.213.154 (talk) 23:33, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Awareness of being "taken" with this practice (of stating the price by number, and insinuating it would be gauche to admit 5% difference in price matters enuf to motivate preferring that the denomination be specified) is evidenced in the film School for Scoundrels, based IIRC on Stephen Potter's books, Gamesmanship and Lifesmanship. The venue may have been a home-furnishings store, and i think one character was there out of need to conceal (via unacknowledged but onerous replacement) damage he'd done in a Woo-manship exercise conducted in a posh borrowed flat, which he insinuated to the lady reflected his own economic status and which required him to casually dismiss, for her "benefit", the damage, and for the salesman's, the pound/guinea distinction, as being unworthy of his own concern. --Jerzy•t 10:32, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Average gold content units?
Do the average gold content values of "0.9100" and "0.9094" refer to the percent pure gold by weight? E.g., 91 percent or 90.94 percent pure gold? As a novice on this topic, it would have helped me to have that better defined or explained. Bill_Starr (talk) 19:38, 13 January 2010 (UTC)


 * That's a subtle question, and I don't know the answer, except that the guinea was claimed to be minted in 22 carat gold. If you simply divide 22 by 24, you get 91.67 per cent. Supposing "0.9100" and/or "0.9094" is a correct figure, then you need to get to the true meaning of "22-carat gold". Clearly, the different ratios of gold by weight and gold by volume will vary, depending on what other metal the gold is alloyed with. Silver, copper, nickel, platinum and zinc have all been used for alloying gold at different times, but I believe the traditional metal used as an alloy in gold coins was silver. Moonraker2 (talk) 09:49, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

You're right to question it. In Science pure numbers are also known as dimensionless, because they have no units but are generally just ratios (so the units cancel). Gold content is not dimensionless. the units would have to be units of weight or volume. The numbers like 0.9100 are dimensionless because they are describing the ratio of the weight of the gold in the coin to the weight of the coin, so the 'grams' cancel. 0.9167 = 7.7 grams/8.4 grams, for example. The writer confused 'content' with 'purity.' — Preceding unsigned comment added by Br77rino (talk • contribs) 21:07, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Elephant and castle
Can anyone find an explanation of the elephant and castle on the 17th century coins? Perhaps something to do with the African origin of the gold used for minting the coins?Thomas Peardew (talk) 19:11, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Sale of rams
A sporadic series of dreadful edits began in May of '07 with an unsupported assertion (in the ip-editor's only contrib to the 'pedia) of special relevance of denomination by guineas to the "sale of rams" (which supplemented the earlier assertion about guineas and horse-race gambling). A later, equally undocumented, refinement (in the form of providing a link) asserted a (presumably different editor's) opinion that the earlier editor (must have) meant, by rams (neither machinery, nor even just males of other livestock species -- e.g. even wild bovid males, or perhaps domesticated goats -- but specifically) domestic sheep -- tho neither editor offered evidence that the latter editor could read the former's mind. (Similar havoc in the same sentence was the piping of "decimalisation" to Decimal Day instead of to the (at least currently) available article!) The (to my knowledge) available remedies are limited, as far as the categories of animals are concerned, to making the distinction vague enuf to suit the absence of sourcing. --Jerzy•t 08:45, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Omission
There is no mention of the guinea coin that has been adulterated by shaving or clipping around the edges, known as a guinea-foul.2604:2000:C682:2D00:5D2D:B629:6EF7:225C (talk) 03:56, 11 December 2018 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson
 * A person who would stoop to such a paltry joke would commit any crime. Doug butler (talk) 06:30, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Thumbnail image sizes
Since we don't know what size screen the article will be displayed in, we should not use absolute sizes in pixels without a convincing reason (such as to have same width as an infobox). So if a change from the default thumbnail size is appropriate, the upright tag is provided. I have changed a number of thumbnail sizes accordingly, but I notice that most were unaltered default size already, so I left them alone.

But the obvious question is this: why do any of the image thumbnails need to be bigger than the default? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:06, 13 June 2021 (UTC)
 * So I decided to wp:BEBOLD and remove the multipliers. All the thumbnails are set to default and controlled by user preferences. I can't see that the article is diminished in any way. If readers want to examine the images in detail, they will click to see the full image from Commons. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:28, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 23:38, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * George II Guinea 651291.jpg