| € | |
|---|---|
Euro sign | |
| In Unicode | U+20AC €EURO SIGN (€) |
| Currency | |
| Currency | Euro |
| Related | |
| See also | U+20A0 ₠EURO-CURRENCY SIGN (predecessor). |
 Category | |
Theeuro sign (€) is thecurrency sign used for theeuro, the official currency of theeurozone. The design was presented to the public by theEuropean Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letterE (orepsilon), crossed by two lines instead of one. Depending on convention in each nation, the symbol can either precede or follow the value, e.g.,€10 or10 €, often with an intervening space.
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. ThePresident 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 byArthur Eisenmenger, a former chief graphic designer for theEuropean 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 prescribedglyph shape, type designers made it clear that they intended instead to adapt the design to be consistent with thetypefaces to which it was to be added.[6]
The euro is represented inUnicode asU+20AC €EURO SIGN. In modern computer systems and mobile phones, this is the onlycodepoint used. When first introduced, however, work to retrofit the symbol into crowded pre-existingcharacter set standards and vendor-specific schemas presented challenges that were not fully resolved until widespread adoption of Unicode.
Initially, different vendors assigned the euro sign to different code positions in their historic encoding schemes.[a] This 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-datecomputer font with the properglyph was available), but mixed setups often produced errors. Initially, Apple, Microsoft and Unix systems chose a different code point to represent a euro symbol: thus a user of one system might have seen a euro symbol whereas (when the file was transferred) another would see a different symbol or nothing at all. In such situations character set conversions had to be made, often introducing conversion errors such as aquestion mark ⟨?⟩ being displayed instead of a euro sign.
Initially, some mobile phone companies issued an interim software update for their specialSMS character set, replacing the (less-frequently-used in Europe) Japaneseyen sign with the euro sign. Subsequent mobile phones have both currency signs.
Depending onkeyboard layout and the operating system, there is a variety of ways to enter the symbol. The symbol is engraved on most keyboards used in Europe. (For entry methods in other territories, please refer to local sources or the articleUnicode input.)
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).[7] 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 €).
In English, the euro sign – like thedollar sign ⟨$⟩ and thepound sign ⟨£⟩ – is usually placed before the figure, unspaced,[8] 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 areseparated with a full-stop, not a comma as in many countries (e.g.,€1.50,14 euros). The European Union'sInterinstitutionalStyle 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]
Prices of items costing less than one euro are often written using a local abbreviation likect. (particularly in Spain and Lithuania);c. (Ireland);Λ (Greece (lambda));snt. or written-, without any symbol (Finland). For example, 10 cents may be written as10 ct.,10c.,10Λ,10 snt. or-,10, depending on location. The US style¢ is rarely seen in formal contexts. In all cases, prices may be written as decimals, e.g.€0.07 or0,07 €, according tonational conventions.
A4, thegeneric currency sign (¤). Others, such as Microsoft, chose to ignore the part of the standard that reserved the codepoints80 to9F for another block ofcontrol characters, instead using them for characters that had not been encoded in the standard. In itsWindows-1252 codepage, for example, Microsoft allocated80 to the euro symbol. The effect of this was that documents exchanged between systems with different implementation choices would fail to display (or print) the euro symbol on arrival unless passed through a conversion process.
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