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by yitchelle 4151 days ago
In Europe, it is acceptable to put the € symbol after the digits as in 10,67€. Just putting in a contrast here..
4 comments

"Acceptable" is not really the right word here - in most (all?) EUR countries it is actually the norm.
Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Granted in advertisements and billboards you'll often see the € sign suffixed in small, or just left out entirely, but i dont base my norm on advertisements.

When suffexed, i mostly see "EUR" or "EURO" used instead of the € symbol: 123,40 EUR.

> Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40.

Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK)

By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th... for a reasonably complete table.

That table claims it follows the value in Germany, that is not entirely correct.

Colloquially, EUR values are expressed with the currency symbol following the value, but in nearly all business correspondence (i.e. invoices, contracts, etc), it is actually prefixed and in many cases (likely for historical compatibility reasons) spelled out.

In other words, in day-to-day use you'd likely see this:

123,40 €

In more formal situations and invoices you'd expect this:

EUR 123,40

I'm not sure whether this split pre-dates the Euro. I recall seeing "DM 123,40" before the Euro, but I was too young to pay much attention to that kind of thing. Most signage used "123,40 DM" or even "12 Pf." (for Pfennig, the equivalent of cents) or left it off entirely, I think.

For Polish currency you also put the "zł" symbol after the price(50zł). Absolutely never ever before the price.
This is how we write it in French (3.14€ instead of €3.14).
In the UK we place the € symbol before the digits when referring to European prices (probably because the £ symbol is also placed before the digits).