"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 03/01/18 (coins slang name: bob, bender, tanner, quid)

I have an e-mail from Neil and Christine Shuttleworth from Huddersfield, who said some of the old coins have slang-type names, such as tanner and bob and quid for a 1£ note, and they wonder where they come from. I'll start with bob for a shilling. That's incredibly convoluted, this one. It's a bit of a mystery. One theory is it stems from the use of bob by bell ringers in churches for a ring of the bells. And as the word shilling came from a Germanic word, "skell", which also meant ring, it might be a very clever play on words, but, as I say, that's a slightly sequitous answer. The truth is they're not completely sure. A sixpence, we do know, was once known as a bender. And that's because due to its silver content, it could be bent quite easily. It was commonly done, bent in this way, to create love tokens and you can find some of these wonderful love tokens,  sixpence love tokens in museums today. But the value of a sixpence was enough, quite often, to get you quite inebriated, shall we say, at your local pub, and some people say that's at the root of going on a bender. A tanner, another name for the sixpence, dates from the 1800s. Again, not completely sure about this one, but there is a Romany word, "tawno", which simply means "a small one". And again, that may be account for it. And finally, the "quid" - we think this comes from the classical Latin quid, meaning "what", in other words, a quid is your what, your wherewithal, your means to buy something. So that's just a few, a whizz around some of the coin origins, as I say, but they're very, very difficult to track down, and the hunt goes on.