Meaning
A friendly prompt asking what someone is thinking, typically addressed to a person who has gone quiet or is staring absently into the distance. It offers a notional coin as payment for sharing the thought, framing curiosity as a small, affectionate bargain rather than a demand. Warm, conversational, slightly quaint; a fond opener to a distracted friend or a gentle probe after bad news. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The earliest known appearance is in Sir Thomas More's Four Last Things, a work generally assigned to 1522 and printed only after his death: the passage observes that a person's face betrays a mind 'walking a pilgrimage', so that 'other folk sodainly say to them: a peny for your thought' - with 'thought' in the singular, suggesting the expression was already proverbial when More wrote it down. Grammarist and most references give 1522; The Phrase Finder cites an early printed edition of the Treatyce (c. 1535) for its quotation. The offer carried real weight in Tudor England, where a penny was a meaningful sum rather than a token. Shortened forms such as 'a penny for them' and simply 'penny' are recorded later; The Phrase Finder notes H. G. Wells using the one-word form in Love and Mr Lewisham (1900).
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a penny for it
- a penny for them
- penny for your thoughts
Usage Examples
- You have been staring at that spreadsheet for ten minutes - a penny for your thoughts?
- A penny for your thoughts, he offered, sliding into the chair opposite her at the nearly empty diner.
- Whenever my sister goes quiet on a long drive, a penny for her thoughts usually gets the whole story.