In
Canada, a
penny is a
coin worth one
cent, or of a
dollar. According to the
Royal Canadian Mint, the official national term of the coin is the "one-cent piece", but in practice the terms
penny and
cent predominate. Originally, "penny" referred to a two-cent coin. When the two-cent coin was discontinued,
penny took over as the new one-cent coin's name.
Penny was likely readily adopted because the previous coinage in Canada (up to 1858) was the British monetary system, where Canada used British
pounds, shillings, and pence as coinage alongside U.S. decimal coins and
Spanish milled dollars.