Where does the Euro sign go? €€€

[Craft]

Cent is also a good choice because as a word it was actually already familiar to everyone in Europe (Greece as a possible exception?): everyone knows it from 'centimetre' (the pronounciation varies a little by language, but not much, for instance in Finnish it's 'senttimetri' and the eurocent is 'sentti').

It would have been very weird for us Finns (and I guess for many others, too) for instance to start calling the 0,01 € a groschen or haler or something similar.

[Viperazzi]

snt is by far the most stupid, stubbornish abbreviation I've ever heard of. c is so much better, shorter, cooler looking and more international. There are also funny cases, like when the price is "€0,50 cents" . Learn to write for crying out loud! I think there's a kind of rule that if the abbreviation abbreviates half of the word or less than half of the word then it is useless.

[Craft]

I think there's a kind of rule that if the abbreviation abbreviates half of the word or less than half of the word then it is useless.

Not exactly. There are some handy abbreviations like 'pvä' (from 'päivä' = day) or 'vko' (from 'viikko' = week) or 'nro' (from 'numero' = number) or 'krs' (from 'kerros' = floor) or 'klo' (from 'kello' = clock; not to be confused with a certain German word ) that are only half or less abbreviated from the original word. Maybe those are not the "official" ones in every case, but very clear and handy anyway.

I might also add 'eur' (or 'EUR') that is sometimes used, even if only the 'o' is cropped from the end. But I think 'eur' should not be used at all, if there is a possibility to type '€', and 'EUR' should rather be for currency/financial market purposes only. One officially recommended abbreviation for the euro is 'e' but I think it is rather bad. The lower-case e somehow appears a weak substitute for the rather strong €-symbol...

[bocky]

Finnish is pronounced as it's written, so the euro-sign must of course be after the number, not before it.
Always when I read stuff written the other way around, I end up reading "euros one and a half" instead of "one and a half euros". Which always confuses me and I lose the point of what I was saying and become very grääyrgh, if you understand.

That's exactly what happens to me. Before the euro, we used to read the $ sign as "escudos", so, for example, 1500$ would be "mil e quinhentos escudos". Now with the € sign, we also have the tendency to read it, and reading €20 as "euro vinte" doesn't make sense... It's "vinte euros", and it's easier to say that if it is written 20€. But strangely I write €20 instead of 20€.

[milanocapitale]

In Italy we say 20 euro and we use this form more than 20€ for example.But for us "euro" has no plural because we don't add a "s" at the end of the word to make it plural so someone use the word "euri" that's incorrect.

[BadGirl]

That's exactly what happens to me. Before the euro, we used to read the $ sign as "escudos", so, for example, 1500$ would be "mil e quinhentos escudos". Now with the € sign, we also have the tendency to read it, and reading €20 as "euro vinte" doesn't make sense... It's "vinte euros", and it's easier to say that if it is written 20€. But strangely I write €20 instead of 20€.

Yes, we use the € after the numbers, as we say "twenty euros - vinte euros" and not the other way around. And we use 0,50€ for "cinquenta cêntimos - 50 cents".

[Craft]

Btw, at least a bit related to this topic:

I don't know what happened to the way of writing decimals when the euro came.

Before the euro, we used to write prices like 2,50 mk (mk meaning 'markkaa'), 14,20 mk, 5,90 mk etc.

Now, it's very common to see price notations like 2,5 €, 1,9 € etc.

Where did people leave the second decimal? Even if it is 0 in these cases and can be omitted, I do think that the new practice seems somehow awkward.

Has the same happened in other eurozone countries whose national currencies had the fractions in use? (Obviously e.g. in Italy, the decimals of liras were not used, but how about Germany, Netherlands, France etc nowadays?)

[androl]

We always use the second decimal, and we also say 2,50€ as "2 Euro 50" and 2,05€ as "2 Euro 5"
That was the same with DM: 2,34DM = "2 Mark 34"
In 2001/2002 when the euro was new, you could hear peaple in shops say "2-Komma-3-4-Euro" but only for short time until they noticed it's the same as with DM

[grob-e]

In 2001/2002 when the euro was new, you could hear peaple in shops say "2-Komma-3-4-Euro" but only for short time until they noticed it's the same as with DM

I remember in the very first days of the euro many cashiers saying "2 Euro and 34 Eurocent, maybe to make clear that they don't mean US-Cent, but that saying disappeared rapidly (I think I haven't heard it after the first week January 2002).

Happy X-mas
Grobi

[FANTAS]

I've always written 10€ or 10,10€ (sometimes replaced by 10.10€ )

At least here the cents have always two digits (except in gas stations where they use 3) but that is because the conversion between euros and escudos is easier with cents, for example:
10.00 € = 2000 $
15.30 € = 3060 $
with only one digit it would be harder.

Also everyone says "10 euros e 80 cêntimos", not "10,8 euros". I imagine that people think it could be considered a trick to make the price similar to 10 euros and 8 cents.

[YvesD_fr]

Does anyone know which side of the amount the Euro symbol is supposed to go. e.g. €15.37 or 15.37€ ? I've seen it written both ways, does it vary from country to country?

Also, do we use the american "cent" sign if its below 1 euro. 50c or €0.50/0.50€.
...
btw. Has anyone ever LOST a €500 note?!

harryzer0

Hello,

In France, prices on tags may appear either as € 12,50 or 12,50 €. Same situation for catalogs of items.

For calculations, writting, etc., the units should always be located to the right of the figures, i.e. 'this object costs 12,50 €'. We never interrupt the unit and the 'decimes' of 'centimes', so the writting it costs 12€5 is erroneous as would be, 'this electronic device provides 5A5 under 3V5' in place of '... provides 5,5 A under 3,5 V'. However, we would *say* and not write 'this costs 12 € 50 (twelve euros fifty)! French is not completely logical I admit but I get used to it !

Note also that the separation between the units and 1/10, 1/100 etc. in French is a coma and not a dot. In other word, 12.5 € in english is 12,5 € in french. We say in French 'centimes' for cents, a usage inherited from the french Franc era. We write 0,50 € or 50 c., or 50 ct., or (but this is inapropriate imho as abbreviations for units should not be plurial) 50 cts.

Voila! For the last question, I have never lost a 500 € note, and I have never seen one, neither have I seen a 200 € note.

Best,

Yves

[Phaseolus]

even the french-speaking part of Belgium has to use "cent" and not "centimes"

Well it depends from people to people...

if you pronounce cent in French like "sent" in English, then it really sounds like a foreign currency to me : it sounds more familiar to speak about an american cent and to use the word "centimes" in French. When we used Francs, whether French, Luxemburgian, Belgian or Swiss, we used the word "centimes"...

But it's true that when I go to Belgium, a part of the french-speaking Belgians use the word "cent" pronounced "sent"...

I use the word "centime" ; and when I go to flanders or the Netherlands, I dutchifiy it and say "centiem"... But, then people start to look a bit strange to me...

I believe that Euro is starting to get into the habits of Europeans and with the time they will "appropriate" it into their own language...

We had a lot of slang words in French to describe certain amount of money with the Francs : like a 10.000 FRF was a "Brique" (a building brick)... I have not yet heard anything similar for it in France, yet...

Only for a fiver, I have heard, And I have been using the words "Un petit gris" (a little "grey") ; gris was also a slang word for "money"... Serge Gainsbourg, a famous French signer, used this term frequently...

[FANTAS]

We had a lot of slang words in French to describe certain amount of money with the Francs : like a 10.000 FRF was a "Brique" (a building brick)... I have not yet heard anything similar for it in France, yet...

Only for a fiver, I have heard, And I have been using the words "Un petit gris" (a little "grey") ; gris was also a slang word for "money"... Serge Gainsbourg, a famous French signer, used this term frequently...

In Portugal we used to refer to thousand escudos as "contos", in english it can be "count" (or "tales" ).
1000$ = 1 conto
2000$ = 2 contos
...
This was an official word and was used all the time to refer high values (everthing 2000 and above).


The slang words for escudos were many but the most common was "paus" ("sticks").



For euros I haven't heard nothing yet.

[Dakkus]

We had a lot of slang words in French to describe certain amount of money with the Francs : like a 10.000 FRF was a "Brique" (a building brick)... I have not yet heard anything similar for it in France, yet...

Only for a fiver, I have heard, And I have been using the words "Un petit gris" (a little "grey") ; gris was also a slang word for "money"... Serge Gainsbourg, a famous French signer, used this term frequently...

In Portugal we used to refer to thousand escudos as "contos", in english it can be "count" (or "tales" :) ).
1000$ = 1 conto
2000$ = 2 contos
...
This was an official word and was used all the time to refer high values (everthing 2000 and above).


The slang words for escudos were many but the most common was "paus" ("sticks").



For euros I haven't heard nothing yet.

What about such slang words as the Finnish "örö", "ege" or "juro" meaning "euro"? :)

[groentje]

I can understand they don't hear much Finnish slang in Portugal