There were originally 30 proposed designs for a symbol for Europe's new common currency; the Commission short-listed these to ten candidates.

Gazet van Antwerpen has attributed the symbol to Belgian graphic designer Alain Billiet.

[2] The symbol € is based on the Greek letter epsilon (Є), with the first letter in the word "Europe" and with 2 parallel lines signifying stability.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 says he had the idea 25 years before the Commission's decision.

When first introduced, however, work to retrofit the symbol into crowded pre-existing character set standards and vendor-specific schemas presented challenges that were not fully resolved until widespread adoption of Unicode.

Initially, different vendors assigned the euro sign to different code positions in their historic encoding schemes.

This led to many initial problems displaying the euro sign consistently in computer applications, depending on access method.

While displaying the euro sign was no problem as long as only one system was used (provided an up-to-date computer font with the proper glyph was available), but mixed setups often produced errors.

[9][10][11][12][13] Prices of items costing less than one euro are often written using a local abbreviation like ct. (particularly in Spain and Lithuania); c. (Ireland); Λ (Greece (lambda)); snt.