"A Penny for Your Thoughts" | Origin

Reviewed by Gavin Meiring, Lead research and primary author · Doctoral Candidate (Corporate Governance) · Research and drafting assisted by AI

Penny for Your Thoughts

"A penny for your thoughts" is a phrase used to invite someone to share what they are thinking, especially when they appear to be lost in thought or unusually quiet. This page traces the origin of the phrase from its earliest recorded use to its place in modern conversation.

How to Use This Page

Read the meaning above to confirm you understand when the phrase is used.
Explore the historical section to discover the documented origin of the phrase.
Review the modern examples to see the phrase in different contexts.

The History

The phrase is one of the oldest recorded idioms in the English language. Its earliest known appearance is in Sir Thomas More's "A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation," written around 1535. More used it in a way that suggests it was already a familiar expression rather than a new coinage, which implies it may have been in common spoken use even earlier than its appearance in print.

In the sixteenth century, a penny was a small but meaningful sum of money, enough to buy a modest amount of food or drink. Offering a penny for someone's thoughts was a gentle, slightly humorous way of suggesting that even a small payment might be enough to prompt someone to share their inner reflections. The phrase captures a moment of observed silence, a curiosity about what is going on in someone else's mind.

The phrase passed through the centuries largely unchanged, which speaks to its elegance and utility. It appears in literature, drama, and correspondence across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. By the twentieth century it had spread widely in both British and American English and had become something of a cliche, a phrase so familiar that it sometimes draws a knowing smile. That familiarity has not diminished its use, however, as it remains a warm and affectionate way to draw someone into conversation.

How It Is Used Today

In casual conversation, someone might notice a friend staring into the distance and say "A penny for your thoughts?" to gently invite them to share what is on their mind. The tone is usually warm and curious rather than intrusive.

In fiction and screenwriting, the phrase often signals a quiet or reflective moment between two characters. One character uses it to draw the other out of their internal world and into a conversation.

In everyday speech, the phrase is sometimes used ironically or playfully when someone has clearly voiced an opinion: "A penny for your thoughts? I think I've already heard them at length." This humorous inversion plays on the original meaning for comic effect.

Common Misunderstandings

Some people assume the phrase implies that thoughts are cheap or not worth much, because a penny is such a small amount. In fact, the spirit of the phrase is the opposite. The offer of any payment, even a small one, signals that the listener is genuinely interested in what the other person is thinking and considers it worth something. The phrase is an act of attentiveness, not dismissal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "a penny for your thoughts" mean? It is a friendly invitation for someone to share what they are thinking, particularly when they seem preoccupied or unusually quiet. The speaker is expressing interest in the other person's inner reflections.

Who first used the phrase "a penny for your thoughts"? The earliest known written use is by Sir Thomas More, around 1535. However, the way he used it suggests the phrase was already familiar in everyday speech, so it may be older than this recorded date.

Is the phrase still used today? Yes, it remains in common use, though it is recognised as a well-worn expression. It is used in conversation, writing, film, and television, and its longevity reflects how neatly it captures a particular human moment of gentle inquiry.

Is there a modern equivalent to "a penny for your thoughts"? In more casual or contemporary speech, someone might simply say "What are you thinking?" or "You seem miles away, what's up?" The penny-based phrasing is more idiomatic and slightly more formal, carrying a hint of old-fashioned charm.

What a first-use claim has to establish

A claim that a phrase was first written in a particular year rests on four things: a dated edition, the exact words as they stand in it, the sense those words carry in their own context, and a search across the spellings the phrase might have been printed under. A statement missing any one of the four repeats what someone else wrote rather than checking the record.

The printed line behind the 1535 attribution

PhraseFinder records the first known use of the phrase in Sir Thomas More's A Treatyce upon the last thynges, dated to about 1535, and prints the line as it stands there:

In such wise yt not wtoute som note & reproch of suche vagaraunte mind, other folk sodainly say to them: a peny for your thought.

Three details in that line carry the argument for the date. The spelling is peny, with a single n and a single y, so a search on the modern spelling misses the printed form outright. The words are reported as what other people say, which presents the phrase as existing speech rather than as a fresh coinage by the author. And the printed form is the singular your thought, while the modern idiom is almost always the plural your thoughts.

The page above gives the work as A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation and dates it around 1535 as well. The two records do not agree on the title, and neither of them settles which title belongs to which text. A reader checking the attribution is better served by searching the quoted line than by searching either title.

The shortened forms and the Wells example

A phrase gets trimmed once it is familiar enough to survive the cut. PhraseFinder records the shortened form a penny for them, and then a shorter one again in H. G. Wells's novel Love and Mr. Lewisham, published in 1900, where a single word carries the whole invitation:

"Penny," she said after an interval. Lewisham started and looked up. "Eh?"

That exchange is evidence of familiarity rather than a curiosity. A phrase can only be reduced to one word when both speakers already know the full form, so the novel dates the abbreviation and not the phrase itself. It also shows the direction the shortening runs: from the full invitation, to a penny for them, to penny alone. Each step drops words that the listener no longer needs.

Testing four claims that circulate about the phrase

Claim	What would confirm it	What would weaken it
More wrote it in 1535	a dated edition carrying the line	an earlier dated printing of the same words
the phrase was already common speech	a text that reports it as something people say	a text that offers it as a new figure of speech
the plural thoughts is the original	an early source printing the plural	early sources printing the singular
the penny offered was a trivial sum	price records showing a penny bought nothing	price records showing a penny bought food or drink

Run against the records above, the first two claims hold and the third does not, because the 1535 line has the singular. The fourth is not settled by either source, and the section below explains why a money conversion cannot settle it.

What a money conversion cannot settle

Turning a 1535 penny into a present-day figure takes a price index, and each index answers a different question. A retail price index answers what a basket of goods cost. An earnings index answers how long someone had to work to earn it. Metal content and gold parity answer something else again, and the three answers can differ by more than an order of magnitude on the same coin.

That means a sentence of the form "a penny in 1535 was worth about X today" carries no information until the index is named. The phrase itself survives all three answers without needing any of them. Its point is that a small sum is being offered for a thought, and the offer works as a joke about value whether the coin was a day's food or a week's wages.

How a dictionary entry for an idiom is put together

An entry for a phrase does five jobs, and reading its structure tells you what it is and is not claiming.

It fixes a headword form and lists the variants in use, so a reader can find the entry under a wording other than the one they typed.
It gives a date and a quotation for the earliest use it accepts, and says which edition that quotation comes from.
It prints later dated quotations that show the phrase in use over time, which is how a shift in meaning becomes visible.
It carries an etymological note where the origin is contested, and marks the difference between what the evidence shows and what has been proposed.
It adds a usage label, such as regional, informal, archaic or chiefly British, when the phrase is not neutral across all English.

The earliest quotation in an entry is the earliest that the dictionary's readers have found. It is a floor rather than a ceiling, and it is never a claim that nothing earlier exists. The 1535 line sits in that position for this phrase, and the page above treats it the same way by noting that the usage suggests an earlier spoken life.

Where the record for this phrase is thin

The printed record starts when printing does. A spoken life before the first printing leaves no trace, and the earliest printed use is only ever a lower bound on the age of the phrase.
The variant spellings split the search. Peny, pennie, penni and penny are four separate strings, and a search on one of them can report a first use without covering the others.
The shortened forms are harder to date than the full phrase. A bare Penny in dialogue depends on the edition's punctuation, and a modern editor's speech marks can conceal an older printed form.
Attribution follows the citation. More is credited here because a printed source names him. The same line in an unattributed collection, or in a lost manuscript, would leave the phrase with the same date and no name attached.

A short check for any dating claim about the phrase

Take the date of the edition you are quoting, not the date the author wrote the text.
Copy the line with its original spelling and compare it against the source, character for character.
Search the singular and the plural, and each spelling variant, before calling any result the first use.
Ask what the line says about familiarity. A phrase presented as something people say is evidence about speech, and evidence about speech is not the same as evidence about coinage.

Sources read for this section

PhraseFinder, entry "A Penny For Your Thoughts", written and reviewed by Gary Martin, at phrases.org.uk. Read 13 September 2026. Carries the More quotation with its circa 1535 date, the shortened form a penny for them, the Wells example, and the note that the expression is now less common among younger speakers.
H. G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham, 1900, quoted in the entry above. The novel is in the public domain and the passage is available in full at Project Gutenberg.

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