In the UK, writing 1.99£ would be considered a bit weird. I'm also interested to know if this is acceptable in other European countries without the Euro as their currency, e.g. Denmark.
Why is it common in the eurozone to write € after the price, e.g. 1,99€?
MiscThey drive by the left. What did you expected? At least, in UK they spell the dates starting by the day, not the month
They drive on the left comes from a time when, on horseback, you had your right arm free to defend yourself if needs be. You'd pass the approaching horse on the left and be able to have your sword or pistol in your right.
Nah, it's because you get on horses from their left. So, by riding on the left, you can sit/unsit without being in the "middle" of the road or blocking the road, and this sit/unsit happend much more frequently than having to defend yourself. As a Spaniard living in Ireland for 10 years, I still don't understand why the Irish didn't switch to driving on the right just to piss off the British. xD
Not everywhere had roads when this was a practice. As for changing to driving to the right, that would cost billions in infrastructure changes. Imagine the motorways, etc. Also, I wish they did the second-hand cars in Ireland are astronomical prices since the UK left the EU. Would be so much easier to import a used car from Germany or france, etc
that would cost billions in infrastructure changes.
It would probably cost more than a few lives too.
Irish people are fairly shit at driving. Imagine shit drivers on the wrong side of the car and asking them to drive on a side of the road they're not used to.
Throwing in a massive change like switching sides would be theoretically the sensible thing to do. In practice, it would most likely be a total nightmare.
Even the swedes managed to switch from left to right side driving. How hard could it possibly be?
There were A LOT of accidents in the beginning though.
You see, as they always do the swedes thought they were clever, so in case it wouldn't work out, before changing all the signs and markings on the roads, they thought they'd save some money and make it an experiment in the beginning for just trucks and busses ...
They did it 60 years ago.
Still, they are swedish. Can't be that hard
I'm sold. Let's do it.
All other European countries came from the same situation but chose to drive on the right side of the road.
Realistically I think a regular guy probably passed only few people per year on horseback. Most of them just normal folks. I.e. there wasn't a constant need to be ready to defend oneself from invading armies and robbers.
Even more realistically I think most people just walked. Horses were for those with money. And I'm not sure how many people were allowed to carry swords and other weapons. I've done zero googling, but I wouldn't be surprised if the right to be armed was reserved for nobles and crown's men. I mean, in TV medieval times are exciting and violent. In reality I guess it was super slow, boring and common people saw maybe 20 different faces during their lifetime.
And literally the only reason these other countries drive on the right is because France ‘wanted to do the opposite’ to the English
And on continental Europe people famously didn't need to defend themselves because it was such a peaceful area.
There is only one true way to write dates in the 21st century, and that is to follow the ISO standard of YYYY-MM-DD
ISO standard people somehow manage to be more annoying about date formats than Americans.
Starting with the year will always be unpractical in every use that doesn't require the year, which is most of them (yes, it's useful for alphabetic sorting, which I need exactly never, and if I did I'd use the ISO format for that particular task and not in regular communication)
Starting with the year makes it flow with sub-day units: YYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-ss
it's also logical and can extend down to milliseconds in descending order of magnitude.
I agree. In these times the string based sorting of the computers gives to this format the power of doing an actual sorting by date
There is only one true way to write dates in the 21st century, and that is
to use the Unix Epoch.
Number’s getting a bit long.
Weird hill to cry on. The world isn't going to adopt putting the year first. You will either get used to it or cry for the rest of your life about it.
I hate it. I wanna know what day. I know the year. Day first all the way
Because our old currency system - which we only stopped using in the 1970s, so within many people's lifetimes - had three denominations: pounds, shillings and pence. (Actually it had four, but I won't go into farthings right now). It was written in this style:
- 5 pence - 5d
- 12 shillings 5 pence - 12/5
- 6 pounds, 12 shillings 5 pence - £6/12/5
- 6 pounds only - £6/0/0 (just added this to show how zeroes were handled)
The pound symbol therefore got added to the front on currency amounts totalling a pound or more to avoid possible confusion. You wouldn't put the pound symbol at the end because that could make it seem like the pence amount was the pounds amount.
Edit: Actually, there is one other factor which I do remember reading about but I'd completely forgotten about up until now. There is a theory - one of those types which will probably never be possible to completely prove or disprove - that currency symbols used to be put in front because of forgery protection.
If you, being Jack Jones, have a piece of paper saying "I, John Smith, agree that I owe Jack Jones the sum of 1/17/3 (or 1.78 or whatever)" it is relatively easy to just casually write another number on the start to make it look like the debt is much larger. Then when you get together with Jack and show him the paper and ask him to settle up, he now has to either pay you the inflated amount of 21/17/3 (or 21.78) or go through legal channels who may decide that HE is the one trying to abuse the system to escape a debt. But if you put a £ symbol on the start, it suddenly becomes very hard to forge larger numbers because there's no room to squeeze another number in without it looking fake.
The same non-decimal system was used in much of Europe. It just stuck around longer in the UK. "Pounds", "shillings", and "pence" were also a thing in many places (often with very similar names, like e.g. Pfund, Schilling, Pfennig in German). The pound is not an actual currency, but a unit of account. For the UK, technically, the currency is the "Sterling". But since it's one of the few countries that kept using pounds (and shillings and pence), the two became mixed up, so that the Pound's generally seen as the name for the currency.
The pound/shilling/penny system was first introduced by the Carolingians in the 8th century. They replaced gold with silver as the basis for their coins, but kept using old Latin names: libra, solidus, denarius, a.k.a. pound, shilling, penny. The word "libra" is also the source for the £-sign.
makes a lot of sense. by the way reading orwell's "road to wigan pier" was a pain because of this currency system, had to look up modern conversions all the time
Why do you write it before the price? "£10" is "pounds ten"?
I guess in times when things were hand-written (e.g. checks), if you write 100.00$, you can easily forge that to say 1100.00$. However, if you write $100.00, the only thing you can add is more decimal places.
Whether that's the actual real reason, I have no idea.
Make the dot a comma and you have yet again the same problem
Not in French 😎
Not in Polish as well, I think half of European countries have it inverted
I think all of the continental Europe has the dot and the comma inverted from the US
That and the use of "milliard" instead of "billion" (and billion meaning something else), i.e. the use of the long scale
Although I've been noticing that both are getting generally broken all the time, to the point I think it's slowly trending towards the US way of saying things
Soon we'll write our dates as MM/DD/YY !!
Portuguese uses the long scale but there's no dedicated word for a short scale billion. It's just "a thousand million".
In Polish we are leaving a space for thousands, so 1 000,70 zł is thousand złoty and 70/100.
And we will say "billion" in English but no one is using that in Polish instead of "miliard".
It's funny that in Murica they use billion for milliard and trillion for billion since the 'bi' means two, a million to the power of two and 'tri' three, a million to the power of three. Short scale makes no sense. I wonder what kind of sports biathlon and triathlon are there.
Fair point (pun intended).
Decimal points used to be half the height of the line rather than just a full stop.
Changing a cheque from 100.00 to 1100.00 is only a minor diffrence compared to a 100,000. The latter would invite a lot more scrutiny from the bank.
No because we use dot dot dot comma.
€10.000.000,00
Is 10 million euro.
Belgian here.
In a check you also spell the amount in letters and put the # sign after the amount. You never put the money sign because it's pre-printed.
I've heard that before, but don't you also write out the numbers in cheques exactly for that reason?
Case closed!
There used to three units of currency before decimalisation, so Pounds (£), Shillings, and Pence (d). For most of that time a Pound was an awful lot of money for most people, and most prices were just Shillings and Pence, and prices were typically written as something like 2/6 which meant 2 s, 6d, Putting the pound symbol in front disambiguated it so £3/3 was the same as £3/3/- but having the £ first meant the /- for no pence was not necessary. Just to confuse it more £3/3/- was also 3 Guineas (an ancient currency unit still traditionally used for paying for race horses, and barristers).
Or perhaps that is just all nonsense and it just grew up without any logic 😊
Pre-decimalisation Pounds were wild. But your description is correct.
I don't know why this is done, it seems illogical given your point.
So do all/most English speaking countries. I don’t expect anyone knows why at this point.
It's good to ask yourself questions first before assuming the others are wrong and you are doing it right.
I can see why putting the symbol afterwards makes sense. Don’t get me started on using a comma as a decimal point though…
Because it comes from a security feature when using cheque books and pricing.
£10.00 verses 10.00£ In a cheque, someone could place a random number in front of the 10.00£ making it 210.00£ it was an extra security feature.
That’s why we used to put a line before the number on cheques, so you had something like ——10.00€
We used a hook like this, called Accountant's nose.
In France we also write down the number so it cannot be forged. Harder to change letters than numbers
Same in Poland, additionally to what I wrote above.
Similarly, when I wrote checks we would put a line at the end £101.31-
Dont check need to be written both with numbers and letters ?
"Extra security feature" and nit just for cheques
Well I usually pay " two euros", etc. Not "euros two".
Well you usually pay "two crowns" not "two euros" don't you :D
Is there still something in grocery store that costs 2 Kč?
plastic bags are 1 Kč each (I believe they still are, haven't bought one in a while)
If he‘d pay with euros it would be instantly 100% more expensive.
The real question is why in some countries they do it the other way.
It seems to be mainly English-speaking countries. In Ireland it is also written as €1.99, not 1,99€
Would be interesting to know how it came to be. Because 1.99€ would seem like the natural way as it matches the way we say it.
I think it might be because in the UK, they didn't use decimals until the 60s if I remember correctly. So a price would be given as "1-10-0" instead of "1.50 pounds".
If. you break up your currency that way, you can't put the Pound sign at the end because the last number is not in Pounds but in Pence. It has to go to the front. The UK had Prices listed as £1-0-5 for example if it was 1 Pound, 0 Shillings and 5 Pence.
And because of the UK/USA relationship and the later American dominance, maybe this got carried over to other cultures who use (local) dollars.
Just conjecture though!
I have no factual basis for that inference, but I also assume the same. And it chimes with the explanation given in the Wikipedia entry about pounds-shillings-pence regarding how the old currency was written.
Well technically we say 1€99, but that would look terrible
some say it like that.
In Sweden you would say "One point/comma ninetynine euros"
Really? That's interesting. In Germany it's "one ninety-nine", or "one Euro ninety-nine". The same as with meters and centimeters. A person just short of two meters is also "one ninety-nine", or "one meter ninety-nine".
How do you say heights in Sweden?
Height is the same, we say "en komma nittionio"/"one comma ninetynine".
Or we simply sat it in centimeters - hundred and ninetynine cm.
That being said, you sometimes hear "one ninetynine" and that way of saying lengths and numbers, especially in spoken Swedish. It's a way of saying it faster so often used in certain instances.
It's similar to how we sat time so it works. (Twenty ten = 20:10)
In some languages it's actually written like that
In Canada the Anglophones (English Canada) follow what we do, but the Francophones do it in French conventions. When you cross into Montreal for instance, you will see 2,99$ rather than $2.99
As a Montrealer currency, date formats, and number formats are forever a haunting confusing mess.
But no where would you see commas instead of decimal points for prices I think.
Not only. I think Dutch and Belgian, but mixed in Belgium, depending on the language group.
We also write €1,99 in the Netherlands. I wasn’t even aware this is done differently abroad.
In France you'll also see 1€99. Because it's how we read it, 1 euro 99 centimes.
It's more difficult to edit the price (or change the amount of money you get from someone). Example:
We agree that you give me five Euros. You give me a piece of paper which says €5,00. I can't change the price without scribbling all over and making it very obvious I am being fraudulent. If we wrote 5,00€, I could easily make that 15,00€ and nothing would be obvious that something has changed.
(This of course relies on the fact that you write the decimal separator)
In Poland we put a - before the price
That isn't a particularly good reason.
In Romania, whenever the money amount needs to be precise and unalterable, we just write the number followed by the spelling-out of said number. Like so:
I hereby lend my friend 5000 RON (cinci mii lei)
And done, no more debate. This is actually standard practice for certain contracts, for example, any notarized document etc.
I don't know if it's true, but I've heard it was to prevent cheque fraud where you could write in an extra number in front of the withdrawn number. Instead, the $ or pound symbol was in front of that.
Heh. You’re absolutely correct. The Anglophone world loves to put £ or $ at the front of the currency amount. I’ve never questioned it until now. And nor do I have an explanation for it. We just do it.
Complete speculation, but it may be because the old pre-decimalised currency (pounds, shillings, pence) was written with the pound sign at the front? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd
We do € 1,99.
But I understand both. I am financially bilingual.
Look at you showing off
But can you do 1.000,99 and 1,000.99 too? ;)
Only if I really, REALLY apply myself.
I got confused by the PayPal app recently. Despite having the language set to English, because I was paying euros with a German account, it was using a comma for decimal separation, and my phone's number pad was using a dot. I rounded my payment to the nearest euro to avoid accidentally sending €4550, rather than €45.50.
And Ireland does €1.99.
I think we’re the 2 exceptions, maybe Malta too?
Belgium too.
The symbol is just a replacement for the word and as such goes after the number: 1,99 € = 1,99 euros.
It should go in the middle, really, 1€99 for 'one euro ninety-nine'.
That's awful!
Especially for people knowing some math.
It will be the same as 4R7 for 4,7 ohm - oh wait, here is not 4 ohm and 70 cent...
One point ninety nine euros.
In Czech do you group digits after the decimal when reading them? In English it would be always nine-nine.
Yes. Either ninety nine or nine and ninety (the Czech version of neunundneunzig)
But in Euros, we would usually say 9 Euro and 99 cents.
in that case it should be 1€99¢
Many people saying this is awful but it matches how it's often said orally in French. No one, absolutely no one, will say "2 and a half euros" or "2 point 50 euros", the standard way is "2 euros 50", and this is not specific to money, it's how all units are used. I'm "1 meter 80" tall, written 1m80 in informal conversation.
I mentally read "2€99" as "2€+99cts" (where cts means €/100, in terms of units).
Of course, in formal, accounting, or scientific writing, we'll write 1,80 m or 2,99 €, but orally in a formal setting we'll pronounce 2 € 99.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Here in Portugal our old currency was written like that.
Some currencies do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign#Use_in_the_Portuguese_Empire
We've always written the price like that
It used to be 20,99kn (or HRK), now it's 3,59€
Maybe it's also one of those quirks that are different between the anglo- and the continental-world
Like the word "billion"
For the record, the ‘billion’ word isn’t an Anglo world quirk, it is a major difference between US and U.K. English where the US version ultimately won. When I was young in the U.K. a billion was a million million.
TIL
No wonder the word "milliard" was lost to time, even here the people mix up the word "billion" with the word "milliard" all the time
I think we're going to see the whole world switch to the short scale in this century
Milliard however wasn’t a common term in the UK even when we used the same number system for those terms. ‘Thousand million’ is what would be used, and it’s partly why you still see company financial information written as £7,682 million revenue for example.
Milijarda is here to stay in Balkans.
The UK adapted the short scale usage of "billion" meaning a thousand million in 1974. In the rest of Europe a "billion" is still a million million. A thousand million is called a "milliard".
It appears to be. Ireland and Malta write it as €100.
So does the Netherlands.
I thought that was how it is was done. Behind the number looks weird to me
Interesting. Quite random then.
Dutch has €2,50 or €2,-
Except than that now many languages are getting ambiguous because of English billions…
For example.. in Italian, we do still use the world equivalent to “miliard” to refer to 109, but instead of using the equivalent to “billion” for 1012, we just skipped it and started using “trillion”…
Both before and after are acceptable and differ by country, it's based on how the previous currency symbol was used. The majority of languages place it after, but English (so Ireland and international) and Dutch have it before.
Probably because in our native languages (depends on the language and country though, obviously) the currency symbol goes after the number, not before. It does in the European languages that I speak, with English being the exception (by putting it in front).
No Brasil escrevemos R$ 1,99
Writing €1,99 would feel weird to me. I don’t live in the eurozone but in Poland we also write it for example 1,99 zł or 1,99 PLN
On official agreements we write -1.99pln so the forging argument is invalid.
Why would you write the currency before the number? It follows the same convention as any other measurement, we don't write "Kg5" or "m10".
It's a matter of grammar of each language, not the currency.
To me it doesn't Make any sekä to write the symbol first. It's 1,99 euroa not euros 1,99
It's like "Ok prepare to read a price now", just like Spanish put inverted ! in the beginning of the sentence, like "Brace the fuck up, the following sentence is gonna be wild"
€12Э so like this?
Yep, exactly. It's good to know what you are reading from start to finish, otherwise you might get confused midway
So basically, Spanish was constructed for people who'd had their attention span reduced to nothing by TikTok. Man, those Spaniards were really ahead of their time!
Actually, ¡ was created due to Spanish being flexible about building questions and lack of Do/Did... as auxiliary. In fact, we just need a simbol instead of a whole word
Also with the inverted question mark in Spanish. "Prepare for a rollercoaster ride"
Definitely a language thing, but not necessarily because of where you'd say the word in a sentence. In the Netherlands it's usually written as € 1,99, but we still say "2 euro".
British people don't say "It's pound 5"
I suppose that is because as in most units, you read it like "two euros", not "euros two" so 2€ makes more sense grammatically.
Generally prices in euro would be written as €1,99 at least in Dutch, but you don't say euro one, you say one euro.
I also see people in the UK write 1.99£ on their invoices
Really. Brit here. Never seen this. I have seen 15GBP. But if that was written by a person it would be £15.
It’s just a convention/tradition. Neither way is weird. The British way is probably influenced by how we wrote amounts with our pre decimal currency.
I’ve seen a few young Brits using the 2.40£ format but they’re usually uber cool kids who’ve spent a month in Berlin and want to show how European and sophisticated they are.
In Denmark, prices are written as: 19,95
or 10,-
In daily use, we don't write the currency.
I’m guessing this is like Sweden. ,- is not a currency symbol. We have the same but :- It just means there are no öre/øre. 10:- or 10,- equal 10:00 or 10,00. We don’t really have a sign for currency.
We have the same but :- It just means there are no öre/øre.
I'm 32 years old and from Sweden and it was from reading your comment just now, that I realized this. I always just assumed it was some kind of Scandinavian improvised "general" currency symbol. I never realized I've never seen it used with öre...
Another fun fact: you know that strange symbol you get by hitting AltGr+4 on a Nordic keyboard? ¤? That's a generic currency sign.)
TIL, thanks 🙂
On my nordic keyboard it is Shift+4: ¤
I was quite old when I realized and read this too. I’m way past 40. If you’re 32 you at least experienced öre to some extent. Younger people might not have and maybe don’t see the connection.
I remember that I could get 5:- or 10:- and still get some candy at the store when I grew up. One piece of Chewing gum was 0:50 I remember.
One piece of Chewing gum was 0:50 I remember
Which conversely also can be denoted as –:50
. Today it's certainly uncommon for obvious reasons, but it was once common.
Same here, never thought it meant something else than kronor.
We use the same thing in Czechia for our haléře ("cents"). 10,- just means "exactly 10 crowns". Currency might be mentioned after it but there's no symbol for it.
Signs in some places like flee markets may write 10kr, and that is also what is commonly used when denoting a sum in writing. The only place I see DKK used here is in banks and exchange offices
ah yes, true that!
To add, if we want to specify currency we most ofthen write it after the number: '34 kr.' But it is allowed to write it in front as 'kr. 34.'.
In speech it always was: 'That will be five guilders please.' So it makes sense to write it as 5.00fl.
Odd thing out is we never say: 'that will be pound four please.' yet we write it as £4?
That will be five guilders please.' So it makes sense to write it as 5.00fl
yeah, total sense
The true sign for the guilder was ƒ.
Florijnen baby, proper medieval coinage :D
There's lots of difference between written and spoken languages - sometimes the grammar can be quite different, too (eg: cantonese and mandarin share the same written system, but their grammar doesn't quite match each other)
I'm helping edit someone's book at the moment, and most of my edits are removing the 'spoken' feel of the sentences.
Even in your own comment, you're using written grammatical constructs that aren't spoken (the colons). We can also argue about whether the period after 'please' should be inside or outside the quote marks, as that's a style decision, but is meaningless in terms of the spoken language. You've also mixed the case for the initial T in each quote (one upper, one lower) - another element that is meaningless in spoken language.
Because we say "it costs 5 Euro" not "it costs Euro 5". Generally units are always after the number. You are also writing "6 km" or "10 h"
Dutch, English, Austrian German, Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish, Luxembourgish, and Maltese place the symbol before the amount, see Written conventions for the euro in the languages of EU member states.
The question "why" one way or the other is not as easy to answer. Putting it after the amount is consistent with units of measurement and it also somewhat better follows how currency amounts are read. Putting it in front of the amount has readability benefits (you can know it's a currency amount before you read out the numbers, and if you have to work with accounting spreadsheets, you can left align the fields consistently, regardless of how long the number is).
I struggle to care about this. It's a curiosity, but nothing that causes any serious confusion. Write whatever. I can get more fired up about 12- versus 24-hour notation than this.
I've always seen the € symbol before the price here. In fact it was one of the things i constantly asked my parents, why the symbol is before if we say it the other way
Not in the Netherlands/belgium. All currencies whether it’s pounds, dollars or euros are before the amount. In Germany and France it is
So, a little history lesson, I guess.
Back when the stock market was all done analogue, there were big black boards where people would write the currencies by hand. This led to them having the currency symbol written first in the line, so that they don't have to change that part daily, while the actual value was changed all the time. It made things easier and neat. If you needed to find a currency, you just scanned the first symbol in a line, and you would find it easy. This was mostly done in the USA, where the world trading centers were.
This later became practice when writing prices. Now, Eurozone consists of multiple countries which changed their currencies in the last 100 years. Euro is still rather new, it's barely 20 years old.
In these countries, it wasn't as common to have big stock markets with lots of trade like in the USA, so they mostly kept to their own currency. And since it was easier for people to just write the number first, and then the currency after, it became common, especially since eurozone countries didn't have special symbols for their currencies, but rather just a short handle of 2-3 letters. It was easier to write it as a continuation of the number.
Euro has a special symbol, and generally, € is written before the number in a price. There may be some places that still place it after, but that's due to old habits. In general it should go before the number, as it follows the general trading rules.
It just follows on from previous non-Euro currency notation.
In Ireland we write it €10.95
Ireland and Malta do it like the UK though so it’s probably an English language thing. English is common in Malta and arguably dominant.
Is there any country in Europe that switched it round when the currency changed to Euro?
The Netherlands also puts the symbol first. When we had Florints and Guilders and still now with the Euro.
My understanding is that it largely depends on how it was written pre euro.
Generally speaking countries that use a symbol like £ or $ would have put the symbol before the number. Countries that use letters would put the letters after the number.
When the euro came in the countries that previously used the symbol in front of the number continued to do so and those which didn’t also continued to follow their method. Both just replaced whatever symbol or letter combinations that they used before with € instead.
Ireland writes the euro symbol first, my guess is because we used to use the Irish pound and it was written the same as the British
I've always seen the € symbol before the price here. In fact it was one of the things i constantly asked my parents, why the symbol is before if we say it the other way
Yeah this post got me confused, thinking "have I become English? Do Italians write the currency symbol after the amount?". I think I've always written the symbol before the amount
Languages that didn't have a symbol for their currency before the Euro came out tend to put the symbol after the number, those that did tend to put the symbol before. This is because internationally most countries put the symbol before the number. Everywhere that has dollars, the yen, the yuan and whatnot puts the symbol before. Eurozone countries that put it after are the exception to the rule and they do so because of how they put the words or letters with their own currencies before the Euro.
Note that in English when writing the word it comers after. £10 and ten pounds. $10 and ten dollars. ¥10 and ten yen. ¥10 and ten yuan.
Culture and history. There is no correct way, only an agreed way. 👍
Depends on the country. In Belgium it's more common to write the € symbol it in front, but if you write it out in full you'd write 1,99 euro.
In stores, webshops etc it always €1,99.
Google seems to suggest (take this with a £ of salt)
That the reason may be to do with us (UK) having a non-decimal money system originally - to denote that it was currency they'd use a pound sign before a string of numbers and slashes!
To quote a Quora (I know) answer that references a Uni of Hull page that no longer exists (?)
When actual sums of money were being written, by the twentieth century it was usual to write the three units separated only by slashes (called solidus by old printers for this reason) after the £ sign: £20/10/6 meant 'twenty pounds, ten shillings and six pence
So this might be why we're just odd. As I say, £salt
It really depends on the country/language. For example, if you properly show a currency on a website it will dynamically formatted depending on your language browser preferences
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/NumberFormat
I have no idea. At school I was taught to put the symbol before the numer (€1,99) and I cringe whenever I see it the other way around.
Funny, I feel the same way - just for the opposite situation.
From what I learned you write the currency sign before the number but you write currency after the number.
Example € 4,99 or 4,99 euro
In Portugal's previous currency, the symbol came after the number. I think originally the symbol was the decimal separator, like 50$00 for 50 escudos (it wasn't quite a dollar sign but an S with two strokes), but the decimals weren't used anymore by the time we switched to the euro - 1 escudo was about half a euro cent so subdivisions of that were a bit useless.
I think the official guideline is to write the € first, but it doesn't come intuitively to most people. People write it how they say it.
In Norway the denominator is always at the end of the price
Not Europe but in Japan we do it the British way ¥199 we also drive on the left. I went to a British school so was confused why in Germany they use comma instead of a point for decimals 🥲
As far as I know it's always been €1,99 and not 1,99€ because of knowing the currency used before the price. Though before € it was also always before it not after. Maybe I'm missing something. 1,99€ looks so insanely off to me.
Even before the Euro, we always used the currency symbol at the end: 1,99 DM. That's also how other units are used, including pence in the UK and cents in the US. £0.50 is 50p, not p50, right?
I honestly have no idea why you put the £ symbol in front.
It's maybe a better cheat protection back in the handwritten days, if digit is included.
€5.0 can only be changed to €5.09
While 5.0€ can be changed to maybe 95.0€
In Sweden we always write the currency after the amount.
100 Kronor -> 100 kr
100 Euro
100 Pund
100 Dollar
In Switzerland, you write EITHER
CHF 23.45
OR
23.45 Fr.
Because currency symbols go in front but abbreviations in the back.
I always forget about that and when I write the price in pounds I put the £ at the end 😅
Switzerland doesn't use the Euro obv, and the Swiss Franc does not have a symbol. We just write either Fr. or CHF (some people also write SFr., but that's an anachronism from when the French still had Francs and isn't official use).
I just looked it up and apparently you're officially supposed to put the letters in front, but it's not uncommon to put Fr. behind in informal use if the number has no decimal point (e.g. "10'000 Fr.", but "Fr. 20.50"). CHF always goes in front for some reason.
But in many contexts (e.g. in newspapers) the unit just tends to be written out: "Burglars stole 7000 Francs", "The EU invests 500 million Euro in the future", etc,
We were always taught to write €2 instead of 2€... I'm starting to get confused now
In Belgium it's also €1,99. Very rarely it will be written 1,99€ and it always bugs me. This is mostly in 1 person businesses and stuff though
cuz its normal? are you saying 10 dollars or dollars 10?
I'm also interested to know if this is acceptable in other European countries without the Euro as their currency, e.g. Denmark
No we write 10kr
Why is it common in the USA to write $ before the price, e.g. $1.99?
As someone on this thread commented, it's likely because the USA used to have the old, hand written stock markets, and it was just neater to write the currency first.
Why is it common in the eurozone to write € after the price, e.g. 1,99€?
It's a language thing not a currency thing
I'm so happy I found this thread because American Twitter was convincing me that I write something wrong. Now I know it's just the European way to write the currency symbol.
Afaik it is also common in Switzerland to put the currency in front, like Fr. 50.- or CHF 50.00....I saw that a lot like this in Switzerland.
It’s an anglophone format mainly; you are the odd one out. Ask yourself why would you say ”euros 2” instead of ”2 euros”. Currency symbol after the number seems to be the standard in the majority of the rest of the world.
Yeah, we write it with euros and with crowns and all other units. Just like we say it. Or we don't use the currency at all if it's clear it's crowns, just 10,50 or 10,- is enough.
each currency has it's format. Most use the symbol before eg €, £, $ or ¥, while others after eg, zł or kr.
If you use 3 symbol codes (USD, EUR, PLN, CHF, GBP, JPY etc) in SWIFT format code is written before the amount
Same as many. People pay "divi eiro" (2€) not "eiro divi" (€2). Also "eiro divi" (€2) gramatically implies approximate payment, meaning euro or two (€ 2).
The Netherlands doesn't do it. France has this weird thing where they do 1€99
In Ukraine we write the currency after the price, no idea why, it’s just this way, I heard in USA it’s another way so people won’t add numbers in the check or something
The currency symbol on the front it's most an anglosphere thing and not the norm.
Not true. While there is no definitive standard for the €, most currency symbols worldwide are expressed before the amount; this is the international banking norm, which banks also do apply to the €.
In accounting in UK context it's sometimes written as 100£
It's consistent with any other unit
10m = ten meters
10€ = ten euros
Why do you write it before the price? "£10" is "pounds ten"?