Euro sign

The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the Eurozone and some other countries (such as 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. In English, the sign precedes the value (for instance, €10, not 10 €); in most other European languages, the reverse is true.

Euro sign
In UnicodeU+20AC EURO SIGN (HTML € · €)
Currency
CurrencyEuro
Related
See alsoU+20A0 EURO-CURRENCY SIGN (HTML ₠) (predecessor).
Category

Design

Official graphic construction of the euro logo
The euro sign in a selection of fonts
The euro sign; logotype and handwritten

The euro currency sign was designed to be similar in structure to the old sign for the European Currency Unit (encoded as U+20A0 ). There were originally 32 proposals; these were reduced to ten candidates. These ten were put to a public survey. After the survey had narrowed the original ten proposals down to two, it was up to the European Commission to choose the final design. 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 European 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. It is assumed that the Belgian graphic designer Alain Billiet was the winner and thus the designer of the euro sign.[1]

Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (ϵ) – a reference to the cradle of European civilization – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro.

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 claims he had the idea prior to the European Commission.[3]

The European Commission specified a euro logo with exact proportions and colours (PMS Yellow foreground, PMS Reflex Blue background[2]), 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 to design their own variants instead.[4]

Use on computers and mobile phones

Generating the euro sign using a computer depends on the operating system and national conventions. 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. Later mobile phones have both currency signs.

The euro is represented in the Unicode character 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.[lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2] In HTML, the € entity can also be used.

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 is no problem as long as only one system is used (provided an up-to-date font with the proper glyph is 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 see a euro symbol whereas another would see a different symbol or nothing at all. Another was legacy software which could only handle older encodings such as ISO 8859-1 that contained no euro sign at all. 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. Increasing adoption of Unicode and UTF-8 encoding means that these issues rarely arise in modern computing.

Entry methods

Depending on keyboard layout and the operating system, the symbol can be entered as:

  • AltGr+4 (UK/IRL)
  • AltGr+5 (US INTL/ESP/SWE)
  • AltGr+E (BEL/ESP/FRA/GER/ITA/POR/CZE/EST/LTU/SWE)
  • AltGr+U (HU/PL)
  • Ctrl+Alt+4 (UK/IRL)
  • Ctrl+Alt+5 (US INTL/ESP)
  • Ctrl+Alt+e in Microsoft Word in United States layout
  • Alt+0128 in Microsoft Windows (depends on system locale setting)[lower-alpha 3]
  • Ctrl+⇧ Shift+u followed by 20ac in Chrome OS, and in other operating systems using IBus.
  • Ctrl+k followed by =e in the Vim text editor

On the macOS operating system, a variety of key combinations are used depending on the keyboard layout, for example:

  • ⌥ Option+2 in British layout
  • ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+2 in United States layout
  • ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+5 in Slovenian layout
  • ⌥ Option+$ in French layout[5]
  • ⌥ Option+E in German, Spanish and Italian layout
  • ⇧ Shift+4 in Swedish layout

The Compose key sequence for the euro sign is Compose+= followed by e.

Typewriters

Classical 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 create it by typing a capital "C", backspacing, and overstriking it with the equal ("=") sign.

Use

Euro sign on a €50 banknote
A euro light sculpture at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt

Placement of the sign also 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).[6] In those countries where the an amount preceded the national currency sign, the euro sign is again placed in that relative position (e.g., 3,50 €).

The European Commission includes a guideline in its institutional style guide (for its own staff) on the use of the euro sign, stating it should be placed in front of the amount without any space in English, but after the amount in most other languages.[7][8][9][10][11]

In English language newspapers and periodicals, the euro sign—like the dollar sign ($) and the pound sign (£)—is placed before the figure, unspaced,[12] as used by publications such as the Financial Times and The Economist.[13] When written out, "euro" is placed after the value in lower case; the plural is used for two or more units, and (in English) euro cents are separated with a point, not a comma (e.g., 1.50 euro, 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 Germany, Spain, and Lithuania), "snt." (Finland), c. (Ireland) and Λ (the capital letter lambda for Λεπτό ("Leptó)" in Greece): (for exmple, 10 ct., 10c., 10Λ, 10 snt. The US style "¢" or "¢" is rarely seen in formal contexts.

See also

Notes

  1. For details please see the Western Latin character sets (computing)
  2. For Eastern European character set Latin 10 with the euro sign, please see ISO/IEC 8859-16
  3. Alt+0128 is the correct alt code for the Euro under most system locale settings. Under Cyrillic-based system locale settings (using Windows code page 1251), 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.

References

  1. "Belg Alain Billiet ontwierp het euroteken" [The Belgian Alain Billet designed the euro sign]. Gazet van Antwerpen (in Dutch). 10 October 2001. Archived from the original on 1 April 2012. Retrieved 24 September 2011.
  2. "European Commission – Economic and Financial Affairs – How to use the euro name and symbol". Ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 7 April 2010.
  3. Connolly, Kate (23 December 2001). "Observer | Inventor who coined euro sign fights for recognition". London: Observer.guardian.co.uk. Archived from the original on 23 December 2007. Retrieved 21 August 2009.
  4. Typographers discuss the euro, from December 1996.
  5. Mac OS: How to type the Euro glyph, Apple Technical Report TA26547 (11 September 2003).
  6. Euro: valutateken voor of achter het bedrag?, Nederlandse Taalunie. Retrieved 21 December 2006.
  7. OP/B.3/CRI, Publications Office -. "Publications Office — Interinstitutional style guide — 7.3.3. Rules for expressing monetary units". publications.europa.eu.
  8. http://publications.europa.eu/code/de/de-370303.htm#position
  9. http://publications.europa.eu/code/es/es-370303.htm#position
  10. http://publications.europa.eu/code/fr/fr-370303.htm#position
  11. http://publications.europa.eu/code/it/it-370303.htm#position
  12. Article on linguistics: Currency units, TranslationDirectory.com. Retrieved 25 June 2008.
  13. "The Economist Style Guide: Currencies". Economist.com. The Economist. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
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