Word.ws English Dictionary

threepenny-bit

threepenny-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 threepenny-bit

pluralthreepenny-bits

Questions about threepenny-bit

What is threepenny-bit the alternative form of?
Threepenny-bit is the alternative form of threepenny bit.

Words near threepenny-bit in the dictionary

  1. threepences
  2. threepennies
  3. threepenny
  4. threepenny bit
  5. threepenny bits
  6. threepenny-bit
  7. threepenny-bits
  8. threepennyworth
  9. threepennyworths
  10. threeplex
  11. threeplexes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: threepenny-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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-threepenny-bit.ogg.

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