Ether is the currency of Ethereum. Every activity on Ethereum that modifies its state costs Ether as a fee, and miners who are successful in generating and writing a block in a chain are also rewarded Ether. Ether can easily be converted to dollars or other traditional currencies through cryptoexchanges.
Ethereum has a metric system of denominations used as units of Ether. The smallest denomination or base unit of Ether is called wei. The following is a list of the named denominations and their value in wei which is available at https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js/blob/0.15.0/lib/utils/utils.js#L40:
var unitMap = {
'wei' : '1'
'kwei': '1000',
'ada': '1000',
'femtoether': '1000',
'mwei': '1000000',
'babbage': '1000000',
'picoether': '1000000',
'gwei': '1000000000',
'shannon': '1000000000',
'nanoether': '1000000000',
'nano': '1000000000',
'szabo': '1000000000000',
'microether': '1000000000000',
'micro': '1000000000000',
'finney': '1000000000000000',
'milliether': '1000000000000000',
'milli': '1000000000000000',
'ether': '1000000000000000000',
'kether': '1000000000000000000000',
'grand': '1000000000000000000000',
'einstein': '1000000000000000000000',
'mether': '1000000000000000000000000',
'gether': '1000000000000000000000000000',
'tether': '1000000000000000000000000000000'
};