The euro sign is the currency sign used for the euro currency. It is inspired by the Greek letter epsilon and refers to the first letter of the word Europe. The two parallel lines symbolize the stability of the euro. Our money page 3, on the web site of the European Central Bank (a PDF page)

The currency sign was presented to the public by the European Commission on December 12, 1996.

The international three-letter code (according to ISO standard ISO 4217) for the euro is EUR. A special euro currency sign (€) was also designed. After a public survey had narrowed the original ten proposals down to just two, it was then 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, 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 EEC, whose claims to have had the idea before. Eisenmenger's undisputed design achievements include the flag of the European Union.

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.For details please see the Western Latin character sets (computing). In HTML "€" can also be used. The HTML masking was only introduced with HTML 4.0; shortly after the introduction of the euro, many browsers were unable to render it.

The European Commission specified a euro logo with exact proportions and colours (PMS Yellow foreground, PMS Reflex Blue background ^*), 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, typically based upon the capital letter C in a given font.See //www.evertype.com/standards/euro/euroglyph.html this position and //www.evertype.com/standards/euro/eurotypo.html related discussion from 1996. The illustration at the top of this article shows the shape of the official euro logo.

Typing the euro sign on a computer depends on the operating system and national conventions. See Keyboarding the euro sign for details. Some mobile phone companies did an interim software update on their special SMS character set, replacing the less-frequent Japanese yen sign with the euro sign: modern phones have both currency signs.

Placement of the sign is also an example of diversity. While the official recommendation is to place it before the number, people in many countries have kept the placement of their former currencies. This is the case in Spain and France, where people are reluctant to change to a system they find somewhat illogical (writing the currency before, "€2", but reading it after, as in "deux/dos euros"). In France, therefore, € 3,50 is often written as 3€50 instead, following the conventional style for the franc: (example 22F96). Recently people in France, Portugal, Spain and sometimes Belgium have started to write 3,75€ more often.

Further reading

• The €uro: Our Currency web site of the European Commission
• Commission of the European communities Communication from the Commision: The use of the €uro symbol(PDF) 23 July 1997 418 final

Footnotes