It is divided into 100 piastres, or qirsh (قرش [ʔerʃ]; plural قروش [ʔʊˈruːʃ];[7] abbreviation: PT (short for "piastre tarif")[8]) and was historically divided into 1,000 milliemes (مليم  [mælˈliːm]; French: millième, abbreviated to m or mill).

At the beginning of the 19th century, Egypt and Turkey shared a common currency, the Ottoman piastre, divided into 40 paras.

The Maria Theresa thaler was a popular silver trade coin in the region around that time.

Reference to an Egyptian pound unit of account appeared in 1884 on a E£50 promissory note signed by General Gordon at the Siege of Khartoum, but it wasn't until the next year in 1885 that this unit of account would become the official unit.Meanwhile, back in 1840, despite Egypt's separate coinage, it was agreed under the Turkish-Egyptian treaty dated that same year, that the Turkish and Egyptian strikes should nevertheless maintain equal value.

This unit was chosen on the basis of the gold content in the British gold sovereign and maintaining the exchange value of 97.5 piastres to the pound sterling, and it replaced the Egyptian piastre (qersh) as the chief unit of currency.

This reform resulted in the Maria Theresa thaler being adjusted to 21 piastres, with 20 piastres now being rated at 5 French francs, and the foreign exchange rates were fixed by force of law for the important currencies which had become acceptable in the settlement of internal transactions.

It wasn't however until 1899 that banknotes started to appear with the word "pounds" on them, written in English.

This exchange value of 97.5 piastres to the pound sterling continued until the early 1960s when Egypt devalued slightly and switched to a peg to the United States dollar, at a rate of E£1 = US$2.3.

The Egyptian pound was also used in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1899 and 1956, and Cyrenaica when it was under British occupation and later an independent emirate between 1942 and 1951.

[citation needed] Different sums of the Egyptian pound have nicknames in vernacular speech, for example: E£1 bolbol (بلبل) "nightingale" or gondi (جندى) "soldier"; E£1,000 bako (باكو) [ˈbæːko] "pack"; E£1,000,000 arnab (أرنب) [ˈʔærnæb] "rabbit"; E£1,000,000,000 feel (فيل) [fiːl] "elephant".

In 1885, the para was replaced by the millieme in order to decimalise the currency and a new coinage was introduced.

In 1916 and 1917, a new base metal coinage was introduced consisting of bronze 1⁄2m and holed, cupro-nickel 1m, 2m, 5m and 10m coins.

On 1 June 2006, 50 PT and E£1 coins dated 2005 were introduced, and its equivalent banknotes were temporarily phased out from circulation in 2010.

[17] In August 2021, the Central Bank was forced to confirm that rainbow holograms on the new banknotes were a secure watermarking feature to prevent counterfeiting, after online critics suggested it was a covert message of support for LGBT rights.