The euro sign (€) is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the European Union (EU). A currency sign is a graphic symbol often used as a shorthand for a Currency 's name Please update other articles as well to avoid contradiction within Wikipedia e The European Union ( EU) is a political and economic union of twenty-seven member states, located primarily in The sign was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive branch of the European Union. Events 627 - Battle of Nineveh: A Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius defeats Emperor Khosrau II 's Persian Year 1996 ( MCMXCVI) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar) The international three-letter code (according to ISO standard ISO 4217) for the euro is EUR. ISO 4217 is the International standard describing three-letter codes (also known as the currency code) to define the names of currencies established
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Design
The euro currency sign (€) was designed to be similar in appearance to the old sign for the European currency unit, ₠. The European Currency Unit ( ₠; ECU) (the word ECU pronounced either /eky/ /ɛkʊ/ or /əː'siː'uː was a basket of the currencies of the European Community 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 European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive branch of the European Union. The eventual winner was a design allegedly created by a team of four experts who have not been officially named.
| “ | Inspiration for the € symbol itself came from the Greek epsilon (Є) – a reference to the cradle of European civilisation – and the first letter of the word Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to ‘certify’ the stability of the euro. Epsilon (uppercase Ε, lowercase ε; Έψιλον is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a Close-mid front unrounded | ” |
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. The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive branch of the European Union. Arthur Eisenmenger is a former chief Graphic designer for the European Community. The European Community (EC is one of the Three pillars of the European Union (EU created under the Maastricht Treaty (1992 [2]
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. Pantone Inc is a corporation headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, USA 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. A glyph is an element of writing Two or more glyphs representing the same symbol whether interchangeable or context-dependent are called Allographs the abstract unit they [3]
Use on computers
Generating the euro sign using a computer depends on the operating system and national conventions. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination 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. Short Message Service ( SMS) is a Communications protocol allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices. ¥￥ 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 Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Code page [4] In HTML, the € entity can also be used. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure 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. In Mathematics and Computer science, hexadecimal (also base -, hexa, or hex) is a Numeral system with a Code page is the traditional IBM term used to map a specific set of characters to numerical Code point values.
This kind of usage, where the character encoding used was not explicitly declared (or could not 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. In Typography, a typeface is a set of one or more Fonts designed with stylistic unity each comprising a coordinated set of Glyphs A typeface usually comprises A glyph is an element of writing Two or more glyphs representing the same symbol whether interchangeable or context-dependent are called Allographs the abstract unit they One example is a Content management system where articles are stored in a database using a different character set than the editor's computer. A content management system ( CMS) is a computer application used to create edit manage and publish content in a consistently organized fashion Another is legacy software which could only handle older encodings such as ISO 8859-1 that contained no euro sign at all. A legacy system is an old Computer system or Application program that continues to be used because the user (typically an organization does not want to replace or ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard Character encoding of the Latin alphabet. 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. Several linguistic issues have arisen in relation to the spelling of the words Euro and cent in the many languages of the member states Partly since there are no official standards on placement,[5] 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[6]. Ireland ( Irish: Éire, ˈeːrʲə is a country in north-western Europe. The Netherlands ( Dutch:, ˈnedərlɑnt is the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which consists of the Netherlands the Netherlands See also Pound (currency.The pound sign (" £ " or " ₤ " is the symbol for the Pound sterling —the currency of the ƒ The florin sign In many other countries, including France and Germany, an amount such as €3. This article is about the country For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic France topics. Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany ( ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant is a Country in Central Europe. 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. In many national currencies, the cent is a monetary unit that equals 1/100 of the basic monetary unit 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 reading
- Commission of the European communities Communication from the Commission: The use of the €uro symbol(PDF) 23 July 1997 [COM(97) 418 final]
References
- ^ http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/the_euro/notes_coins8958_en.htm
- ^ [1]
- ^ Typographers discuss the euro, from December 1996. The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) is the executive branch of the European Union. Events 1632 - Three hundred colonists bound for New France depart from Dieppe France. Year 1997 ( MCMXCVII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1997 Gregorian calendar
- ^ For details please see the Western Latin character sets (computing). Several binary representations of character sets for common Western European languages are compared in this article
- ^ Frequently Asked Questions
- ^ Euro: valutateken voor of achter het bedrag?, Nederlandse Taalunie, retrieved 21 December 2006. Events 69 - The end of the Year of the four emperors: Following Galba, Otho and Vitellius, Vespasian Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar.