Countries and currencies

Member States

Member States should be listed in the following order, based on the alphabetical order of countries in their original languages.

Please note that the country code abbreviations given here were adopted by the permanent representatives of the Member States, and are different from the international standard ISO two-letter country codes. For non-member countries, it is advisable to use the ISO nomenclature.

For tables in multilingual publications, it is usual to list the abbreviated codes in this order as one version of the table is valid for all language editions. This is the accepted practice in EU publications.

Other countries

For a list of other countries, you can consult the table showing countries and ISO codes in the Inter-institutional style guide (Vade-mecum for editors[1]) of the Office of Official Publications of the European Communities.

Currencies

Use the symbol for the most common currencies (such as €, £, $). Use the ISO code for others. Use no spaces and the suffix -m for million, -bn for billion and -tr for trillion.

Examples:

€37bn

RON56m

A note on the euro

Like ‘pound’, ‘dollar’ or any other currency name, the word ‘euro’ is normally written in lower case with no initial capital.

Guidelines on the use of the euro, issued via the Commission’s Secretariat-General, state that the plurals of both ‘euro’ and ‘cent’ are to be written without ‘s’ in English. This is fine for legal texts but in documents intended for the general public, you can use the natural plural with ‘s’ for both terms.

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[1] This is the title of the publication, but the expression vade mecum is spelt without a dash.