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£sd (occasionally written Lsd, spoken as "pounds, shillings and pence" or pronounced ) is the popular name for the pre-decimal currencies once common throughout Europe, especially in the British Isles and hence in several countries of the British Empire and subsequently the Commonwealth. The abbreviation originates from the Latin currency denominations '' librae'', '' solidi'', and '' denarii''. In the United Kingdom, these were referred to as '' pounds'', ''shillings'', and ''pence'' (''pence'' being the plural of ''penny'').

Although the names originated from popular coins in the classical Roman Empire, their definitions and the ratios between them were introduced and imposed across Western Europe by the Emperor Charlemagne. The £sd system was the standard across much of the European continent (France, Italy, Germany, etc.) for nearly a thousand years, until the decimalisations of the 18th and 19th centuries. As the United Kingdom remained one of the few countries retaining it into the 20th century, the system became particularly associated with Britain. It was King Offa of Mercia who adopted the Frankish silver standard of ''librae, solidi'' and ''denarii'' into Britain in the late 8th century, and the system was used in much of the British Commonwealth until the 1960s and 1970s, with Nigeria being the last to abandon it in the form of the Nigerian pound on 1 January 1973.

Under this system, there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings, or 240 pence, in a pound. Although the standard ledger accounting system recorded only pounds, shillings and pence, actual minted coins could represent one, several or fractions of these units. The penny was subdivided into 4 farthings until 31 December 1960, when they ceased to be legal tender in the UK, and until 31 July 1969 there were also halfpennies ("ha'pennies") in circulation. The perceived advantage of such a system was its use in some aspects of mental arithmetic, as it afforded many factors and hence fractions of a pound such as tenths, eighths, sixths and even sevenths and ninths if the guinea (worth 21 shillings) was used. When dealing with items in dozens, multiplication and division are straightforward; for example, if a dozen eggs cost four shillings, then each egg was priced at fourpence. Basic addition, however, could be more difficult than using a decimal system.

As countries of the British Empire became independent, some abandoned the £sd system quickly, while others retained it almost as long as the UK itself. The United States of America adopted a decimal system in 1792, 10 years after independence from the British Empire, but retains many other aspects of the customary units for length and weight. Australia, for example, only changed to using a decimal currency on 14 February 1966, 35 years after independence. New Zealand followed suit on 10 July 1967. Still others, notably Ireland, decimalised only when the UK did. The UK abandoned the old penny on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971, when one pound sterling became divided into 100 new pence. This was a change from the system used in the earlier wave of decimalisations in Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa, in which the pound was replaced with a new major currency called either the "dollar" or the "rand". The British shilling was replaced by a 5 new pence coin worth one-twentieth of a pound.

For much of the 20th century, £sd was the monetary system of most of the Commonwealth countries, the major exceptions being Canada and India.

Historically, similar systems based on Roman coinage were used elsewhere; e.g., the division of the '' livre tournois'' in France and other pre-decimal currencies such as Spain, which had 20 maravedís to 1 real and 20 reals to 1 duro or 5 pesetas.

Origins

The classical Roman Empire originally used a decimal currency system based on the " as" whereby 1 ''denarius'' = 10 ''as''. The silver denarius was the common circulation coin, but accounting was in sestercii. Later Roman Emperors undertook multiple coinage reforms, redefining weights and coins' relative values and introducing new coins and new accounting systems for them. Since most reforms were not even completed before the next one began, the late Roman Empire had a veritable mess of multiple overlapping systems of weights and currencies.

Around the 780s, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne cut through the mess by creating a new uniform system. He defined the "libra" as a new measure of weight equivalent to around 489.6 grams (substantially larger than the old Roman pound of 328.9g), and ordered 240 silver units known as ''denarii'' to be struck from the new Carolingian pound of pure silver, each ''denarius'' containing 22.5 grains of silver. To help accounting, Charlemagne also decreed that the pound was divisible into 20 ''solidii'' each of 12 ''denarii''. Thus began the Carolingian monetary system

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