Word.ws English Dictionary

three-penny bit

three-penny bit is the alternative form of threepenny bit.

Meaning of threepenny bit

Noun

threepenny bit (plural threepenny bits)

  1. (historical) A former (pre-decimalisation) British or Irish coin worth three old pennies.
    • All day long he worked, cutting out pennies and shillings and half-crowns and threepenny-bits.1934, P[amela] L[yndon] Travers, “East Wind”, in Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins; 1), London: Gerald Howe Ltd […], →OCLC, pages 3–4
  2. (Cockney, slang) A woman's breast; a tit.
    • All these skinny modern chicks with their perky threepenny bits do nothing for me.1983, Robert Drewe, The Bodysurfers, Penguin, published 2009, page 86

Forms of three-penny bit

pluralthree-penny bits

Questions about three-penny bit

What is three-penny bit the alternative form of?
Three-penny bit is the alternative form of threepenny bit.

Words near three-penny bit in the dictionary

  1. three-party systems
  2. three-peat
  3. three-peated
  4. three-peating
  5. three-peats
  6. three-penny bit
  7. three-phase
  8. three-piece
  9. three-piece suit
  10. three-piece suite
  11. three-piece suites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: three-penny bit (page history and authors); threepenny bit (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “three-penny bit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/three-penny_bit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.