chele

What it means

1. 1.

   A cent — and in practice, the smallest imaginable amount of money. It survives almost entirely in the negative: 'no tengo un chele', I haven't got a penny.

2. 2.

   In the plural, chelito', a small amount of cash rather than literal cents.

Examples with translations

• Ando sin un chele hasta que me paguen.

  I'm flat broke until I get paid.

• Eso no vale ni un chele.

  That's not worth a penny.

Where it comes from

The name of a small-denomination Dominican coin, worth a hundredth of a peso, long since withdrawn from circulation. The word outlived the coin by decades. The Central American chele meaning a fair-skinned person is unrelated and has a different history.

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

chelito