Why is penny called a penny?

Answer 1

It is derived from 'pence' which is the one cent piece in the United Kingdom.

Well, not exactly.First, England doesn't have one-cent pieces, and second, "pence" is simply the plural of "penny" when applied to a coin's value rather than in counting a quantity of 1-penny coins.

There's no general agreement over the origin of the word "penny". Some experts trace it back to words referring to a pledge, a token, or even a pawned item.

It has numerous relations to the names of similar coins from various Germanic regions. Most notable are the pfennigdenomination used in Germany until the euro was adopted in 2002, and the near-English pfenje in the Frisian dialect that helped give rise to our language.

In the US, the term is technically an incorrect slang usage. The official name for the US coin is a "cent", but when it was first issued it was very similar to the one-penny coins that had been in use in British colonial days, so most people called the new coins pennies. The old name persisted even when the coin was downsized to its current 19 mm diameter in 1856, and we all continue to call them "pennies" even today. It's a bit like using the word "dial" for a telephone even though phones haven't had dials for decades.