The euro sign (€) is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and adopted, although not required to, by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by two lines instead of one. Depending on convention in each nation, the symbol can either precede the value (for instance, €10), or follow the value (for instance, 10€), often with an intervening space.
Design
Graphic construction of the euro logoThe euro sign in a selection of typefacesThe euro sign; logotype and handwritten
There were originally 30 proposed designs for a symbol for Europe's new common currency; the Commission short-listed these to ten candidates. These ten were put to a public survey. The President of the European Commission at the time (Jacques Santer) and the European Commissioner with responsibility for the euro (Yves-Thibault de Silguy) then chose the winning design.[1] The other designs that were considered are not available for the public to view, nor is any information regarding the designers available for public query. The Commission considers the process of designing to have been internal and keeps these records secret. The eventual winner was a design created by a team of four experts whose identities have not been revealed. Gazet van Antwerpen has attributed the symbol to Belgian graphic designer Alain Billiet.[2]
The symbol € is based on the Greek letter epsilon (Є), with the first letter in the word "Europe" and with 2 parallel lines signifying stability.
The official story of the design history of the euro sign is disputed by Arthur Eisenmenger, a former chief graphic designer for the European Economic Community, who says he had the idea 25 years before the Commission's decision.[4]
The Commission specified a euro logo with exact proportions and colours (PMS Yellow foreground, PMS Reflex Blue background[5]), for use in public-relations material related to the euro introduction. While the Commission intended the logo to be a prescribed glyph shape, type designers made it clear that they intended instead to adapt the design to be consistent with the typefaces to which it was to be added.[6]
Use on computers and mobile phones
Displaying and printing the euro sign using a computer depends on the operating system and national conventions. Initially, some mobile phone companies issued an interim software update for their special SMS character set, replacing the less-frequent Japanese yen sign with the euro sign. Subsequent mobile phones have both currency signs.
The euro is represented in the Unicodecharacter set with the character name EURO SIGN and the code position U+20AC (decimal 8364) as well as in updated versions of the traditional Latin character set encodings.[a][b] In HTML, the € entity can also be used.
History of implementation
An implicit character encoding, along with the fact that the code position of the euro sign is different in historic encoding schemes (code pages), led to many initial problems displaying the euro sign consistently in computer applications, depending on access method. While displaying the euro sign was no problem as long as only one system was used (provided an up-to-date font with the proper glyph was available), mixed setups often produced errors. Initially, Apple, Microsoft and Unix systems each chose a different code point to represent a euro symbol: thus a user of one system might have seen a euro symbol whereas another would see a different symbol or nothing at all. Another problem was legacy software which could only handle older encodings such as pre-euro ISO 8859-1. In such situations character set conversions had to be made, often introducing conversion errors such as a question mark ⟨?⟩ being displayed instead of a euro sign. With widespread adoption of Unicode and UTF-8 encoding these issues rarely arise in modern computing.
⌥ Option+E in German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish layout
⇧ Shift+4 in Swedish layout
The Compose key sequence for the euro sign is Compose+= followed by e.
Typewriters
Typewriters are still used in many parts of the world, often recycled from businesses that have adopted desktop computers. Typewriters lacking the euro sign can imitate it by typing a capital ⟨C⟩, backspacing, and overstriking it with the equals sign ⟨=⟩.
Placement of the sign varies. Countries have generally continued the style used for their former currencies. In those countries where previous convention was to place the currency sign before the figure, the euro sign is placed in the same position (e.g., €3.50).[8] In those countries where the amount preceded the national currency sign, the euro sign is again placed in that relative position (e.g., 3,50 €).
The European Union's InterinstitutionalStyle Guide (for EU staff) states that the euro sign should be placed in front of the amount without any space in English, but after the amount in most other languages.[9][10][11][12][13]
In English the euro sign – like the dollar sign ⟨$⟩ and the pound sign ⟨£⟩ – is usually placed before the figure, unspaced,[14][15] the reverse of usage in many other European languages. When written out, "euro" is placed after the value in lower case; the plural is used for two or more units, and euro cents are separated with a point, not a comma as in many countries (e.g., €1.50, 14 euros).
Prices of items costing less than one euro (for example ten cents) are often written using a local abbreviation like ⟨ct.⟩ (particularly in Spain and Lithuania), ⟨snt.⟩ (Finland), ⟨c.⟩ (Ireland) and ⟨Λ⟩ (the capital letter lambda for Λεπτό Leptó in Greece): (for example, 10 ct., 10c., 10Λ, 10 snt. The US style ⟨¢⟩ or ⟨￠⟩ is rarely seen in formal contexts. Alternatively, they can be written as decimals e.g. 0.07 €.
^For Eastern European character set Latin 10 with the euro sign, please see ISO/IEC 8859-16
^Alt+0128 is the correct alt code for the Euro under most system locale settings. Under Cyrillic-based system locale settings (using Windows code page1251), Alt+0136 must be used. Neither will work under Japanese (932), Korean (949) or Traditional Chinese (950) system locale settings. 0128 works because Microsoft has assigned 0x80 to the Euro sign in these code pages.
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