Euro states; it was not a currency in its own right. They could not be set earlier, because the ECU depended on the closing exchange rate of the non-euro currencies (principally the pound sterling) that day. The procedure used to fix the conversion rate between the Greek drachma and the euro was different, since the euro by then was already two years old. While the conversion rates for the initial eleven currencies were determined only hours before the euro was introduced, the conversion rate for the Greek drachma was fixed several months beforehand. The currency was introduced in non-physical form (traveller's
Euro sign but the cent sign "¢" also appears. Other abbreviations include "ct" (particularly in Germany and Lithuania), "cent." in Spain and Italy, "snt" (Finland) and Λ (the capital letter "lambda" for λεπτό, "lepto", in Greece). Euro sign The euro sign (€) is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the European Union (EU) and other non-EU countries (Kosovo and Montenegro). The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. The international three-letter code (according to ISO standard ISO 4217) for the euro is EUR. In Unicode it is encoded at .