Plural of halfpenny; multiple coins worth half a penny in old British currency.
From 'half' + 'pence' (Old English 'pening'). This plural forms directly from halfpenny but uses a different vowel sound due to historical sound changes in English, creating a pronunciation-spelling mismatch.
Halfpence is a linguistic fossil—the spelling and pronunciation diverged because 'pence' evolved differently than expected. Words like this are why English spelling seems chaotic; they capture historical sound shifts that happened centuries ago in pronunciation.
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