But at least, life never seems to be boring in Britain. 
I find it very surprising that with 20 shillings in a pound, the largest denomination was 5s, and even that was only very rare. Did it mean that if you had to pay a bit less than a full pound, you would have to grab a fistful of those 1s and 2s's? A 2.5-shilling coin is pretty funny, in both senses of the word.
The Czech monetary system has a couple of funny names too, but it's nothing compared to this. Apart from being the only non-monarchy in the world that has a currency called "crowns", there's only a little, since the denominations go very orderly upwards: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 crowns.
Of course people sometimes refer to the coins and notes with different contractions of the appropriate numerals, or sometimes with names of the people depicted on the banknotes. But, other than that, there are only four weird names: "búra" for 5 crowns, "pětka" (which means "a five") for 10 crowns, "kilo" for 100 crowns, and "litr" or "tác" ("(food) tray") for 1000 crowns. I have no idea where they come from, though.
(Except for one thing: I think the reason why a 10-crown coin is called "a five" lies back in the 19th century, when Austria-Hungary, of which today's Czechia was a part, abandoned the "gold pieces" that were used as a currency for a long time, and switched to "crowns" (and when Austria-Hungary fell apart, the Czechs were too lazy to invent anything new and just kept the old name). The ratio was 1 gold piece = 2 crowns, so 10 crowns were 5 gold pieces. I guess that the name just stuck from back then. (By the way, the "gold pieces" of course weren't gold, but even the lowest coins had a comparatively high content of silver in them. IIRC the "gold pieces" were abandoned because people found that a good profit could be made by taking those high-quality but low-value coins abroad and selling them as raw metal. Eventually people started to abuse this fact so much that something had to be done, and so a new currency with far lower-quality coins was introduced )
