Officially, nobody designed it. The European Commission unveiled the sign in December 1996 after narrowing thirty proposals to ten and putting those to a public survey, but credited the result to a team of four experts whose names it declined to publish. The Belgian graphic designer Alain Billiet has been named in the press as the author. Arthur Eisenmenger, once chief graphic designer for the European Communities, maintained until his death in 2002 that he had drawn it some twenty-five years earlier. The Commission has never accepted that account.
What the EU does state is the meaning: a Greek epsilon, which doubles as the first letter of "Europe," crossed by two parallel lines signifying stability.
Arriving in Unicode 2.1 in 1998, it was late enough to do real damage. Vendors had already improvised slots in their own eight-bit encodings — Microsoft put it at 0x80, while ISO 8859-15 used 0xA4, displacing the generic currency sign that lived there. Mismatched guesses about which encoding a file uses are why euro amounts still surface as garbage in old data today.
One genuine trap sits nearby. Euro-currency sign at U+20A0 is a different character that predates the currency; it was intended for the ECU, and Unicode's own annotation on it ends, with rare emphasis, "this is NOT the euro!"
About Euro Sign
Euro Sign is the Unicode character € at codepoint U+20AC in the Currency Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Euro Sign
To use the Euro Sign symbol (€) in HTML, insert the
entity € directly into your markup. The decimal entity € works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\20AC';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u20AC' evaluates to €. In Python source, write '\u20AC'.
The character encodes to E2 82 AC as UTF-8 bytes and 20AC as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8364.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.