Shilling (s)

Equivalent to 12 pence, commonly referred to colloquially as a "bob".

The s is not for shilling. It is for solidus, a late Roman gold coin, and it survives in two places most people never connect: the abbreviation itself, and the slash in 5/6. That stroke is a compressed s, which is why typographers still call the character a solidus. Twelve pence made a shilling and twenty shillings made a pound, so the shilling sat where the decimal system has nothing — a coin worth a twentieth of a pound, useful enough that it survived decimalisation as the five-pence piece and circulated alongside it until 1990. Known universally as a bob, a word whose origin nobody has satisfactorily explained.