Centavo

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title: "Centavo" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["cent-(currency)"] description: "Fractional monetary unit, 1/100" topic_path: "general/cent-currency" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centavo" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Fractional monetary unit, 1/100 ::

The centavo (Spanish and Portuguese 'one hundredth') is a fractional monetary unit that represents one hundredth of a basic monetary unit in many countries around the world. The term comes from Latin centum (), with the added suffix -avo ('portion').

Coins of various denominations of centavos have been made from copper, stainless steel, aluminum-bronze, and silver.

Circulating

Places that currently use the centavo include:

• Argentine peso
• Bolivian boliviano
• Brazilian real
• Cape Verdean escudo
• Colombian peso
• Cuban peso
• Dominican peso
• East Timorese centavo coins
• Ecuadorian centavo coins
• Guatemalan quetzal
• Honduran lempira
• Macanese avos
• Mexican peso
• Mozambican metical
• Nicaraguan córdoba
• Philippine peso (In English usage; sentimo or céntimo is used in Tagalog and Spanish respectively.)

File:50 Centavos (Philippines).jpg|50 Philippine centavos (1964) of the English series. File:10 Philippine centavos (2).jpg|10 Philippine centavos (1945), from the Commonwealth period. File:1-centavo-real-2003.png|1 Brazilian centavo (2003), no longer produced. File:2002phil01centobv.jpg|1 sentimo coin (2002), from the BSP series

Obsolete

Former forms of the centavo that are no longer in use include:

• Brazilian cruzeiro (from 1942 to 1986 and from 1990 to 1993)
• Brazilian cruzado (from 1986 to 1989)
• Brazilian cruzado novo (from 1989 to 1990)
• Costa Rican colón (Between 1917 and 1920 only. As céntimo for other periods.)
• Ecuadorian sucre (New centavo coins continued to circulate after the sucre was replaced by U.S. dollar in 2000.)
• Salvadoran colón
• Guinea Bissau peso
• Mozambican escudo
• Portuguese escudo (before the euro was introduced)
• Portuguese Guinean escudo
• Portuguese Indian escudo
• Puerto Rican peso
• São Tomé and Príncipe escudo
• Venezuelan venezolano
• Venezuelan peso
• Chilean Cent (from 1975 to 1983, as a subdivision of the Chilean peso; out of circulation due to inflation)

References

References

1. (March 2014). "A Dictionary of Finance and Banking". OUP Oxford.
2. (5 May 2016). "Numismatic Archaeology of North America". Taylor & Francis.
3. "Chilean Peso".

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