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,
Language and the euro the same as the unit of measurement of time or of angle. The term , plural ("evroleptó", plural "evroleptá") is sometimes used when a speaker wants to be completely specific that they are referring to money and not time. Some colloquial names for currency are also in use for the euro. One and two euro coins are respectively called ("frago") and ("difrago") from the French "franc". A 5 euro banknote is also colloquially called ("taliro") from the Germanic root "thaler" via the Italian "talero". A 10 euro banknote is called ("dekariko"), a 20 euro banknote is called ("eikosariko") or ("eikosari"),