āṇā

Hindi āṇā was a small coin worth one-sixteenth of a rupee in the currency system of British India. The word's ultimate etymology is uncertain — possibly from Sanskrit anā or from a pre-Sanskrit root. The anna was the basic small denomination of the colonial monetary system, subdivided into 12 pice (or 4 pice, depending on era). The system ran from 1835, when the East India Company standardized Indian currency, to 1957, when India decimalized.

The anna's fractional role in currency gave it a second life in colloquial expression. To say something was 'twelve annas in the rupee' was to say it was three-quarters complete or three-quarters good. 'Fourteen annas' meant nearly perfect. The fraction-of-a-rupee usage became a general idiom for expressing proportions — how much of someone's capacity was being used, how complete a plan was.

British officials in India adopted the idiom and brought it into Anglo-Indian English. Kipling used it. Army officers used it. The anna became a cognitive tool for expressing gradation in a society where precise measurement was often unavailable. The coin's fractional nature made it the natural unit for approximation.

When India decimalized in 1957, the anna ceased to be legal tender. The new paisa system (100 paise = 1 rupee) replaced the anna's sixteenth-of-a-rupee with a hundredth. The idiom persisted for some decades in older speakers but has largely passed out of use. A small coin left a large metaphor.