The Penny Dropped

James M Sandbrook

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The Penny Dropped

The Penny Dropped basically means a person has belatedly put two and two together or understood something.

You may explain something to a person and to you it is clear, but they don’t get it yet,

they don’t understand it yet, and then 2 hours later, or even days, weeks months or years later, they get it.

People can say it to themselves when they finally have that,

“Aha” moment and they understand something that they didn’t understand before.

Sometimes we explain something to a person over and over again and then finally (the penny drops) and they understand it.

Some could liken this to a revelation, in this case a revelation can be enlightening or astonishing disclosure, shocking, and we finally got it.

The verb drop may be conjugated through all its forms.

The phrase was coined in the 1930s in the British publication of The Daily Mirror.

The allusion was made to machines that required a penny to operate.

Sometimes the coin would be stuck and someone would wait for the penny to drop for the machine to work.

When the coin did drop, the phone or toy dispenser or other mechanism would come to life. - Grammarist.