I know it’s the UK currency but if you look at a ten pound note it says on it “I Promise to Pay the Bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds”.
If I walked into the Bank of England with a tenner and asked for ten pounds, what would I get? Apart from some funny looks.
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In Old English, one of the languages that gave rise to what we call English today, there was a word, *steorra,* which meant “star.” In the twelfth century, the *Norman* kingdom (this word taken from both the Norse people and also Normandy) used little silver pennies with little stars marked on them as currency. Adding
“-ling” to the word *steorra,* then, gives us *steorraling,* which eventually drifted to “sterling” over time.
A pound sterling would literally be a pound, by weight, of these little silver coins.
Nowadays, of course, the term “pound” has no connection to the actual weight anymore; you couldn’t ask for a pound of sterling and expect to get anything.
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