The escudo was Portugal’s everyday money before the euro. People paid for bread, rent, and bus tickets in escudos, the way people in Taiwan use the NT dollar, until 2002, when Portugal switched to the euro. Older Portuguese people sometimes still “hear” a euro price as a huge number of escudos, though actually that habit is fading. The name means “shield” in Portuguese: many old European coins were called after the shield stamped on them. Portugal’s former lands had escudos too, and Cape Verde still uses an escudo today, so the word is not only a history-book word. You will meet it on old coins, in travel stories, and in talk about the years before the euro. It is a plain, factual word, not slang and not rude.

埃斯庫多（葡萄牙改用歐元前的貨幣；佛得角仍用）