Everything about the Euro Sign totally explained
The
euro sign (€) is the
currency sign used for the
euro currency. The currency sign was presented to the public by the European Commission on
12 December 1996. The international three-letter code (according to
ISO standard
ISO 4217) for the euro is
EUR.
Design
The euro currency sign (€) was designed to be similar in appearance to the old sign for the
European currency unit, ₠. After a public survey had narrowed the original ten proposals down to two, it was up to the
European Commission to choose the final design. The eventual winner was a design allegedly created by a team of four experts who have not, however, been officially named. The glyph is (according to the European Commission) "a combination of the Greek
epsilon [ε], as a sign of the weight of European civilisation; an E for Europe; and the parallel lines crossing through standing for 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'd the idea prior to the European Commission.
(External Link
)
The European Commission specified a euro logo with exact proportions and colours (
PMS Yellow foreground, PMS Reflex Blue background
(External Link)), for use in public-relations material related to the euro introduction. While the Commission intended the logo to be a prescribed
glyph shape, font designers made it clear that they intended to design their own variants instead.
Use on computers
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. In
HTML, the
€ entity can also be used. The HTML entity was only introduced with HTML 4.0, shortly after the introduction of the euro, and many browsers were unable to render it. The alternative was to use
€ instead, with 128 (80
hexadecimal) being the code position of the euro sign in most
Windows 125x encodings.
This kind of usage, where the character encoding used wasn't explicitly declared (or couldn't be declared), along with the fact that the code position of the euro sign is different in common encoding schemes, led to many problems displaying the euro sign in computer applications. 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), things tended to go wrong in mixed setups. One example is a
Content management system where articles are stored in a database using a different character set than the editor's computer. Another is
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.
Care has been made to avoid replacing an existing obsolete currency sign with the euro sign. That could create different currency signs for sender and receiver in e-mails or web sites, with confusions about business agreements as a result.
Use of the sign
Placement of the sign also varies. Partly since there are no official standards on placement, countries have generated varying conventions or sustained those of their former currencies. For example, in
Ireland and
the Netherlands where former currency signs (
£ and
ƒ, respectively) were placed before the figure, the euro sign is universally placed in the same position. In many other countries, including
France and
Germany, an amount such as €3.50 is often written as
3,50€ or
3€50 instead, largely following conventions for their former currencies.
No official recommendation is made with regard to the use of a
cent sign, and usage differs between and within member states. Sums are often expressed as decimals of the euro (for example €0.05 or €–.05 rather than 5c). The most common abbreviation is "c", but the cent sign "¢" also appears. Other abbreviations include "ct" (partly in Germany), "snt" (Finland), and the capital letter
lambda (Λ for λεπτό, "lepto") in Greece.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Euro Sign'.
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