Malaysian ringgit coinage

Malaysian ringgit coinage comprises the decimal currency pieces issued by the Central Bank of Malaysia. The currency was established on 12 June 1967 to replace the Malaya and British Borneo dollar at par, initially bearing the official title of the Malaysian dollar and cents in English alongside ringgit and sen in Malay. The currency is divided into one hundred sen or cents. As recorded in the earliest releases, the first series of this modern decimal coinage depicts the Malaysian parliament building.

At its inception in 1967, the currency participated in an Interchangeability Agreement alongside the Singapore dollar and Brunei dollar, allowing money to be exchanged at par between the three nations. This mutual arrangement ended on 8 May 1973, when the Malaysian government withdrew from the agreement. On 28 August 1975, the Malay names ringgit and sen were officially adopted as the sole formal designations for the currency, replacing the English terms dollar and cent. Later, in 1993, the currency symbol RM, signifying Ringgit Malaysia, was adopted to replace the dollar sign or M$. The term ringgit is historically an obsolete Malay word meaning jagged, originally applied to the crude, serrated edges of Spanish pieces of eight that circulated widely in the region.

Denominations associated with the coinage include the one-dollar piece, introduced in 1967, alongside fractional denominations such as the ten-sen and fifty-sen pieces. Beyond the parliament building motif of the first series, these fractional denominations became associated with regional Malay, Chinese, and Tamil dialect terms across Peninsular Malaysia, including kupang or puát for ten sen, and lima kupang, samah, or gōo-puát for fifty sen.