The story
Ask almost anyone who said it first, and the answer comes back fast: Benjamin Franklin. It sounds just like him. But the line in his almanac reads differently, and the idea was already old when he printed it.
In the 1630s, the English poet George Herbert gathered a book of sayings from abroad called Outlandish Proverbs. One of them was “A penny spar’d is twice got.” Around 1661, the writer Thomas Fuller put it as “a penny saved is a penny gained.” In a 1695 play, Edward Ravenscroft had “A penny sav’d, is a penny got.”
Franklin’s own version came in Poor Richard’s almanac for 1737: “A Penny sav’d is Twopence clear, A Pin a day is a Groat a Year.” Catchy, but not quite the line we know.
So where did “earned” come from? The Phrase Finder traces it to a small U.S. cent token from around 1863. One side showed Franklin’s face. The other carried the proverb in its modern form. A coin put the words in Franklin’s mouth, and they have stayed there ever since.
