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Here are some words you will see as you learn about saving stamps - what do they mean?
This page is being slowly made and still needs lots of work - have a look at it anyway. Anyone wanting to suggest changes to a definition, or who wants to offer a definition for something not there, please email the Webmaster
postage stamps - Postage stamps are stamps that you can buy at the Post Office to put on letters and parcels that you mail to someone. Every country in the world has postage stamps. When you stick stamps on an envelope or parcel, you prove that you have paid to have them delivered to the address you put on the envelope or parcel. The bigger or heavier the parcel, the more you have to pay and the more expensive are the stamps you buy. sheets of stamps - Stamps are usually printed by the Post Office in sheets containing many stamps. Sometimes there are 100 or more stamps on a sheet. In the old days, all the stamps on a sheet were the same. Now, there might be several different stamps on the same sheet. face - The face of the stamp is the part that shows the picture. Turn it over, and you see the "back" of the stamp. perforations, or perfs - These are the jagged edges around most stamps used until recently. They were invented a long time ago to make it easier to take a stamp from the "sheets" they are usually printed on. They did this by punching little holes in the sheets. Before they put perforations around stamps, they had to cut the stamps from a sheet with scissors. We often call perforations "perfs". Today, many stamps are peeled off and do not have perfs :( Sometimes, just to make it interesting, the Post Office made small holes in the sheets, and sometimes they made larger holes. Stamp collectors use a "perforation gauge" to tell the difference. perforation gauge - Suppose you knew that a stamp had been issued by the Post Office with two different sized perforations. This means that you can save two different stamps! How can you tell the difference? There are thingys you can use that measure the perfs. They have rows of dots spaced just right for each size perf. You place the stamp on it and find which row lines up with the perfs on your stamp - then read the number.
 You will see that perf #10 has larger dots spaced farther apart from perf #14. The smaller the number, the larger the dots and the fewer the perfs on your stamp. You line up the perfs in your stamp with the marks between the holes (dots). In the example, the stamp seems to be perf 10 1/2. Just to make this even more interesting, the perf size along the sides of the stamp were often different from the perf size along the top and bottom. imperforate - Before perforations were invented, stamps came in sheets with no holes in them. You had to cut the stamps out with scissors. Stamps like that are called imperforate. Even after they began perforating stamps, some issues were also made as imperforate, so you can collect examples of each.
 If you were in a hurry, you might not cut them perfectly, and a stamp might end up being snipped too close! Those stamps are less valuable than the ones that still show lots of space around the outside of the stamp. When you have a chance, look at the "Condition" section of this website. The best way to be sure that you own an imperforate copy of a stamp is to have a pair of them together. cover - A cover is an envelope that was used to send mail, such as a letter. Most covers that people collect still have the stamps on them, but not all. Before stamps were invented, people sent letters in what you might call "stamp-less" covers. How did the Post Office know that you paid the money they needed to operate the Post Office? Usually, someone at the Post Office just wrote down the number that you paid. For example, before they had stamps in Canada, and when Canadians used British money, it might have cost 3 pence to send a letter somewhere. You paid the 3 pence and the person at the post office wrote a big "3" in the top right corner. MORE TO COME !!!!!!!!! return to Main Page return to Teens Page return to Pre-teens Page |
