pound sterling
2
3.4
- noun
- /paʊnd ˈstɜr.lɪŋ/
- UK
:
libra esterlina
- North West Water, Ltd., for example, has invested two billion pounds sterling since 1989 in the communities within their service area.
- million pounds sterling
- 20,000 pounds sterling
- billion pounds sterling
You know, the world used the pound sterling as its currency, all of that.
- You know, the world used the pound sterling as its currency, all of that.
- That's what keeps them receiving dollars, receiving pound sterling, receiving cheques and support from corporates and all the rest of it.
- This dramatically lowered the value of the pound sterling, so to stabilize the exchange rate, prices and wages had to be cut, often by almost half.
- So if you can guess exactly to the pound sterling, a bit more in my pocket, how much cash is on this table?
Examples
-
And I paid him fourteen pounds sterling for this silver tankard.
Fiction book (1994) -
Would you give me 100 pounds sterling or 150 dollars?
Blog text (31) -
Yes, about 2 million pounds sterling.
-
And then you offered me 200 pounds sterling.
-
So all that did was make the value of the pound sterling worthless, worth less and less.
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It was written that no Irish man or woman could own property worth more than five pounds sterling.
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Commerce accounted for more than five million pounds sterling in revenue, a sum that affected all aspects of the national economy.
Academic text (2007) -
Five thousand pounds sterling.
-
500 pounds sterling.
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The price of the car was 15,000 pound sterling.
Synonyms
220
1.0
The money used in the United Kingdom and some other countries
68
4.2
Money used in Britain, especially the pound
4
1.2
Money used in the United Kingdom worth 100 pence
A unit of money used in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland equal to 100 pence
Surface Forms
Morphology
Both parts are literal and refer to the same semantic domain: 'pound' as a currency unit and 'sterling' as the British currency/quality, so their combination names the UK's currency. This is a compositional, language-neutral label (e.g., Spanish 'libra esterlina', French 'livre sterling'), so a learner who knows the constituents will understand the MWE.
Etymology
Pound sterling comes from old coin practice: pound was a weight of silver used to make many coins, and one popular story says sterling came from merchants called 'Easterling' whose silver was trusted. So the name meant a trusted pound of silver, and today pound sterling is the name of the United Kingdom's money.