Why would the makers of my laptop decide to devote a key to €? There are so many other useful symbols that I have to go to the trouble of pressing SHIFT, but I can get € with no other steps involved.
That’s the Euro symbol. I’m not sure why your keyboard would have a Euro sign instead of a $, unless you bought it from a manufacturer in the Euro zone.
Euro? Makes a hell of a lot of sense, given that the key on the other side of the up arrow key is the $ key.
Now I need to figure out why I have an ALT GR key on one side of my space bar when the key on the other side is good ol’ ALT.
For some reason I thought it was Sigma. Opppppssssss
So where is that symbol located on the keyboard? Where my $ is?
Mrs O’Malley’s Cow
You could try using ALT 0128 to get the Euro currency symbol €
I said “could” because sometimes those characters display properly on some machines and other times they don’t.
Now you got me wondering, so I went looking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_Gr.
Alt Gr + 4 does it on European keyboards. (Does Alt Gr actually do anything else??)
On my french keyboard, it gives access to all the third symbol on the first row of keys. That would be : ~#{[|`^@]}¤ . I couldn’t even type an e-mail adress without it.
Nitpick: “euro” is not capitalised. (And bizarrely, the plural of “euro” is “euro”, and the plural of the euro “cent” is “cent”).
Happy! I had a recent keyboard crisis and am using an old one that doesn’t have € but now I know how to do it. Thanks, people. 
Not that I NEED the € bu tmight as well know how to do it.
Nice one, GM. Didn’t realise it was peculiar to Ireland.
I recently bought a new keyboard “PCSTUFF” by RCA. It has a Euro symbol on the number 5 key along with the percent key. The 5 key looks something like this:
%
5 €
But, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get that key to display the euro symbol. Any help out there?
Try:
Alt-GR + 5
Alt + ctrl + 5
If these don’t work, try the same but with 4 (the system may be set up to recognise a different keyboard layout)
Well, originally, it was supposed to apply in every country, but since prety much everybody ignored this rule…
And in in " American" keyboard layouts, you can soft-select layouts that will endow the right and left ALT key with slightly different effects, depending on the selected layout.
Right now, my system is set to “Language = English(US)” and “Keyboard Layout = US(International)”. I get:
(L)ALT+4 = beep
(R)ALT+4 = ¤ (list bullet)
(L)ALT+= beep
(R)ALT+ = £ ( pound sterling)
(L)ALT+e = open the “edit” menu
(R)ALT+e = é
(L)ALT+5 = beep
(R)ALT+5 = €
… and so forth
And fine and well they did, I mean, since when so central banks legislate grammar… at least in Spanish (Castillian), referring to “diez millones de euro” sounds ungrammatical (and saying “cincuenta cent” sounds like you’re not speaking Castillian to begin with).
Don’t tell me: the French workers had a general strike about it? 
(Do you say “centimes” too for “cents”?)
¿Tal vez es el idioma castellano ebónico?
For some reason, it doesn’t sound peculiar to my ears at all. After all, isn’t the English plural for many currencies the same as the singular, or have I been misusing and mishearing it all these years? (e.g. 1 lira, 10,000 lira; 1 kuna, 50 kuna; 1 dinar, 5 dinar). Then again, I guess I always pluralized marks, francs, and pesetas.
When English borrows a noun from another language, it often tends to borrow along the plural form (or approximate something that sounds like it) from the source language.
Also, remember that in English, when you render the common noun into a composite adjectival/adverbial form, you do not use the plural: “The six-million-dollar Man”; “ten-cent store”; “four-wheel drive”; “four-man bobsled”; BUT, “It cost six million dollars to fix him”, “that’ll be ten cents”, “it powers all four wheels”, “there’s four men in the crew”. So English is more flexible about this “sounding right”.