Name: EASY ENGLISH VOCABULARY: Money Slang & Expressions
Uploaded: 2025-07-22T18:48:11.000Z
Duration: 10 min 57 s
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In today's video, we're going to talk about money.

Now, more specifically, we're going to talk about how we talk about money in terms of slang and in terms of certain expressions or idioms, right?

And we're going to talk the way people refer to money in everyday life.

So, you may have already heard some of these expressions, but what we call the different coins, the different bills, sometimes they have nicknames.

So, for example, one cent, which is 0.01 dollar, is called a penny.

Now, for those of you who might not know, in Canada, we don't have pennies anymore.

We got rid of them, and the numbers are just rounded up or down to the nearest nickel.

Now, most of these are both US and Canada.

In US and Canada, we say pennies, nickels, 10 cents is a dime, 25 cents is a quarter, okay?

Here, we got other slight differences in the dollar.

Because if you look at a Canadian dollar, on one side, you will see a bird, just a bird floating in water.

It's called the loon, which is why we nicknamed the coin the loonie.

Now, a few years after the introduction of the dollar coin, the government introduced a two dollar coin.

Now, because we already had a loonie, of course, we needed a nickname for the two dollars, so we called it a toonie, just so they rhyme.

In the US, they don't have a two dollar bill or coin.

But, in both countries, you can say one dollar is a buck, or you can say any dollar amount, you can say buck or bucks.

Buck basically means dollar, so one buck or a buck, five bucks, ten bucks, a hundred bucks.

Loonie is only one dollar, toonie is only two dollars.

A five dollar bill, both countries have bills, a common nickname is a fiver.

But, again, not everybody uses it, but in case you do hear it, you understand a fiver means a five dollar bill.

There's a company that sells products and services for five bucks or less, and it's called Fiver2.

Some people call a ten dollar bill a ten spot, sometimes they'll say twenty spot, but not as common.

And twenty dollars is twenty dollars, but notice that I don't say twenty dollars, I say twenty.

Most people will say twenty, they just take the t off because it's just shorter and easier.

Okay, so that's how we talk about the money itself.

The hundred dollar bill, you might hear people refer to as a C note.

From Latin, cent meaning one hundred, or even from French, meaning one hundred.

Or the Roman numeral C equals one hundred, so some people might call it a C note.

In the US, they might call it a Benjamin, because on one side of the hundred dollar bill, there's a portrait of a man, that's Benjamin Franklin, that's who's on the hundred dollar bill.

When people talk about the Benjamins, they're referring to money in general.

So, now, we also have a few expressions that include money terms.

So, if we're talking about dime a dozen, so dime, ten cents, dozen means twelve.

If something's a dime a dozen, it means it's very common, nothing special.

So, for example, if you buy bagels in the old days, now you can't buy anything for ten cents, but in the old days, you could buy, like, twelve bagels for a dime.

It was actually cheaper to buy a dozen than to buy individual items, right?

So, now, when we talk about something that's cheap and not very special, or very common, or it's everywhere, or nobody cares so much about it, it's a dime a dozen.

So, for example, somebody says, oh, my friend is a very good English teacher.

And you say, well, listen, I live in Canada, I could get English teachers at a dime a dozen.

Means English teachers are very common, they're nothing special in Canada.

In some other countries where there aren't many English teachers, a Canadian teacher would be a very valuable asset.

So, nickel-and-dime, so nickel-and-dime, we use this expression in two ways.

It could be an adjective, or it could be a verb.

As an adjective, when you're talking about a nickel-and-dime store, or a nickel-and-dime production, it means very cheap, not very high quality.

Because everything costs, like, a nickel or a dime, there was nothing expensive in it.

To nickel-and-dime someone means to try to bargain a little bit too much for, like, little things that don't really matter.

So, if I go to buy a car, and the car is, let's say, $20,000, and I say, come on, just give me a discount, like a $100 discount.

And he goes, why are you trying to nickel-and-dime me?

Just buy the car and get your value out of it some other way.

So, to nickel-and-dime means to try to get a discount, or to try to be cheap about something, or to try to get somebody to do something a little bit more, or for a little bit less.

But very little, it almost makes no difference.

Next, if somebody is counting pennies, so pennies, counting pennies means worried about everything they spend.

So, if you go to the store, and you say, okay, you want to buy a can of tuna, let's say.

Okay, I'll buy this one because it's cheaper.

If you're counting pennies, you're already very worried about money, and maybe you don't have much money, or maybe you're just the type of person who worries for no reason, right?

So, counting pennies, worried too much about money.

A penny pincher, when we call somebody a penny pincher, it means they're pinching.

They don't like to let go of the money, so if you try to take their penny, they're pinching it really hard.

Very cheap person, a person who doesn't like to spend money, always tries to save as much as he can or she can.

To give your two cents worth, if somebody offers their two cents worth, or asks you for your two cents worth, they're basically asking for your opinion.

If I want to give my two cents worth, I want to give my opinion.

For some reason, opinions are worth two cents.

Cents basically means pennies, so two pennies.

This must be a very old expression, because I think opinions are worth a lot more than two cents these days, but the expression stuck.

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EASY ENGLISH VOCABULARY: Money Slang & Expressions

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