Euro
currency of most countries in the European Union
The euro (symbol: €; currency code: EUR) is the official currency of 21 of the 27 member states of the European Union. This group of states is officially known as the euro area, more commonly named the eurozone. Each euro is subdivided into 100 cents.
The currency is also used officially by the institutions of the European Union, by four European microstates that are not EU members, by one British Overseas Territory, as well as unilaterally by two European states that are not EU members. Outside Europe, a number of special territories of EU members also use the euro as their currency.
The euro is used by 358 million people in the eurozone, in addition to those living in states and territories where the euro is also the sole official currency. Furthermore, over 200 million people worldwide use currencies pegged to the euro. It is the second-largest reserve currency as well as the second-most traded currency in the world after the United States dollar. As of December 2019, with more than €1.3 trillion in circulation, the euro has one of the highest combined values of banknotes and coins in circulation in the world.
The name euro was officially adopted on 16 December 1995 in Madrid.
The public source identifies “Euro” as currency of most countries in the European Union. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Euro, currency and most.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4916. The Library of Congress control number is sh98003388. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019 and 1995.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Euro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.