Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun See piaster.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun now historical A Spanish or Spanish-American coin and unit of currency, originally worth eight real.
  • noun A form of currency originally used in the Ottoman Empire, and now used in the Middle Eastern countries of Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan and Syria.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a fractional monetary unit in Egypt and Lebanon and Sudan and Syria
  • noun 100 kurus equal 1 lira in Turkey

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Italian piastra ("plate of wood or metal; coin"), probably from Latin emplastra.

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Examples

  • But the piastre is a name for coins of very different kinds; there are, for instance, the Government, the bazaar, the current, and the copper piastre, all and each of them representing completely different values.

    Three Months in the Soudan 1885

  • It is the smallest Egyptian coin, made of very base metal and, there being forty to the piastre, it is worth nearly a quarter of a farthing.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • Greek “Asper,” some silver; and representing, when at par, the fortieth of a piastre, the latter = 2d. 2/5ths.

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • It is perfectly quiet; I have green trees to look upon, and spend the sum of one piastre a day.

    Letters of Two Brides 2007

  • Not only are these bulls sold, but people are ordered to buy them; and, as is but right, they cost more in Peru and Mexico than in Spain; they are there sold for a piastre.

    A Philosophical Dictionary 2007

  • Scraping the last piastre from the peasants, the tax collectors extracted a “great diversity of currency,” much of it in antique or small coinage, still strung together as jewelry.

    Three Empires on the Nile Dominic Green 2007

  • Scraping the last piastre from the peasants, the tax collectors extracted a “great diversity of currency,” much of it in antique or small coinage, still strung together as jewelry.

    Three Empires on the Nile Dominic Green 2007

  • Scraping the last piastre from the peasants, the tax collectors extracted a “great diversity of currency,” much of it in antique or small coinage, still strung together as jewelry.

    Three Empires on the Nile Dominic Green 2007

  • His defense, that the street was nothing but an open sewer anyway, failed to sway the arresting policeman who marched him across town at gunpoint to pay a fine of one piastre four francs.

    The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

  • His defense, that the street was nothing but an open sewer anyway, failed to sway the arresting policeman who marched him across town at gunpoint to pay a fine of one piastre four francs.

    The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

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