European Currency Unit opportunity for foreign diversification without reliance on the currency of a single country. The ECU was conceived on 13 March 1979 as an internal accounting unit. It had the ISO 4217 currency code XEU. On 1 January 1999, the euro (with the code EUR and symbol €) replaced the ECU, at the value €1 = 1 ECU. Unlike the ECU, the euro is a real currency, although not all member states participate (for details on euro membership see Eurozone). Two of the countries in the ECU basket of currencies, UK and Denmark, did not join the eurozone, and a third,
Euro two percent higher on the year, approximately at the same level as it was before the crisis kicked off in 2007. The formal titles of the currency are "euro" for the major unit and "cent" for the minor (one hundredth) unit and for official use in most eurozone languages; according to the ECB, all languages should use the same spelling for the nominative singular. This may contradict normal rules for word formation in some languages, e.g., those where there is no "eu" diphthong. Bulgaria has negotiated an exception; "euro" in the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is spelled as eвро ("evro") and