On trading desks around the world, nobody says “the GBP/USD exchange rate”. They say “Cable”. The nickname is more than a century old and points back to a genuine piece of Victorian engineering.
The transatlantic telegraph cable
In the 1860s, after several failed attempts, a working submarine telegraph cable was laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the United Kingdom and the United States. For the first time, a message could cross between London and New York in minutes rather than the ten or more days a ship would take. Among the most valuable messages carried along that wire were exchange-rate quotes for the pound against the dollar.
Traders in London and New York began to speak of the rate that came “over the cable”. The pound-dollar quote was the cable rate, and the shorthand stuck. More than 150 years later, long after the original cable became obsolete, GBP/USD is still universally known as Cable.
Other pound nicknames
The pound collects nicknames. Sterling is the formal name of the currency itself; quid is the everyday British slang for a pound (as in “twenty quid”). On FX desks, “Cable” refers specifically to the pound against the dollar — GBP against other currencies has its own shorthand. The dollar, for its part, is the greenback or the buck.
Why the nickname still matters
Beyond trivia, the Cable story is a neat reminder of how deeply intertwined the British and American financial systems have been for a very long time. The pound and dollar were the two great currencies of their respective centuries — sterling in the 1800s, the dollar in the 1900s — and the cable that linked them was, in a sense, the first piece of the modern, instantaneously-connected global currency market that sets the GBP/USD rate you see on this site today.
For the long history of the rate that travelled over that cable, see our GBP/USD history page.