kobo

kobo noun: a subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Nigerian naira.

Noun

kobo (plural kobos or kobo)

A subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Nigerian naira.
- How much would those ones drop in his bowl? Tattered, dirty, sellotaped five-naira notes? Those coins that had just been reintroduced but were useless, because not even bàbá dúdú was sold for fifty kobo or one naira anymore? Was one naira actually money if you could not even buy sweets with it?2023, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, A Spell of Good Things, Canongate Books, page 182
(Nigeria) A coin with the value of one kobo; (by extension) a very small amount of money.
- The new kobo is the same size as the old Nigerian shilling and carries a depiction of cocoa seeds.1972 October 9, The Times, London, →ISSN, →OCLC, Nigeria Supplement, page viii, column 4; quoted in “kobo”, in R[obert] W[illiam] Burchfield, editor, A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary...
- In this case, more people buy cassettes than records with the consequence of the musicians losing heavily on their records royalties since these pirates will not give a kobo [penny] to any artiste whose record he recorded for sale.1982 February, “‘We Are Suffering’”, in The Entertainer, Ibadan, →OCLC, page 5; quoted in Christopher Alan Waterman, “The Social Organization and Contexts of Jùjú Performance in Ibadan”, in Jùjú: A...

No one ever had coins, nothing less than a one-naira bill; the driver had laughed at my handful of kobo.1984, George Packer, “A Boulangerie in Lagos”, in The Village of Waiting (Vintage Departures), New York, N.Y.: Vintage Books, published...
In the play, lawyer Ramoni Alao, because of his nagging wife, decides to go to the market to get special clothes for “Ileya” without a kobo in his pocket.1989, Olu Obafemi, “Zulu Sofola’s Theatre”, in Henrietta C. Otokunefor, Obiageli C. Nwodo, editors, Nigerian Female Writers: A Critical...
I would usually part with a few kobos, or copper pennies, for a small, dusty heap of tomatoes, or a larger pile of oranges.1992 October 17, Frances Bissell, “Exotic fruits and roots”, in The Times, number 64,466, London, →ISSN, →OCLC, Weekend section, page 5...
Because she was blind, people would always give her a few kobos (small coins).2017, Patience Ibrahim with Andrea C. Hoffmann, translated by Shaun Whiteside, “Back to the beginning”, in A Gift from Darkness: How I...

plural	kobos
plural	kobo

Ultimately from English copper, probably via one or more West African languages (compare Igbo kọbọ̀ and Fula kobo).

What does kobo mean?: Kobo means a subdivision of currency, equal to one hundredth of a Nigerian naira.
How do you use kobo in a sentence?: No one ever had coins, nothing less than a one-naira bill; the driver had laughed at my handful of kobo.
What part of speech is kobo?: Kobo is a noun.
What is the plural of kobo?: The plural of kobo is kobos.

Adapted from Wiktionary: kobo (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “kobo.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kobo. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.