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Origin documented
“Penny wise, pound foolish”
What it means
Careful with small sums while wasteful with large ones.
Where it comes from
The same 240-to-one ratio does the work. Attending closely to pennies while losing pounds is a failure of proportion rather than of care.
How sure are we?
Recorded from the early seventeenth century and probably older in speech. Robert Burton used it in 1621, by which time it already had the ring of a settled proverb.