Euro sign

This article is about the euro sign ( € ). For the euro currency, see euro.

The euro sign in a selection of fonts.

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 had the idea prior to the European Commission.[1]

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, font designers made it clear that they intended to design their own variants instead.

Official graphic construction of the euro logo

A euro light sculpture at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt

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.

Use of the sign

Main article: Linguistic issues concerning the euro

Placement of the sign is also an example of diversity. 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), the capital letter lambda (Λ for λεπτό, "lepto") in Greece.

Further reading

• Commission of the European communities Communication from the Commission: The use of the €uro symbol(PDF) 23 July 1997 [COM(97) 418 final]

• The euro symbol