I hadn't thought about that euro issue, but I suppose it's logical that those countries that have always put their currency symbol after the amount would just continue to do so with the new currency.

I generally write times with a colon separator, e.g. 10:15, but a lot of British publishers prefer to use 10.15 instead. Some use only a single digit for the minutes when they're below ten, e.g. 2.0 for two o'clock or 4.5 for five past four. That always looks very strange to me, and I would write 2:00 or 4:05 (followed by am or pm, if required).

Maybe Ragner can confirm this, but I seem to recall from my classes of long ago that in German the half hour is worked out a different way. In English, 5:30 would be "half past five," but I think the Germans phrase it as "half before six" or something like that.

It's amazing how many variations one can find for something so relatively simple! Even in Britain, many people would not understand the American form such as "It's ten of two."

On those French phone numbers, they not only write them in pairs but they also read them out as though each were a separate number, e.g. 23.45.67.89 is "vingt-trois, quarante-cinq.." etc. (i.e. twenty-three, forty-five....)

The standard form for phone numbers here has always been that anything from 3 to 6 digits are written in one block: 234567. Seven-digit numbers have always been split as 3/4, as in 222 1234, and the new 8-digit numbers are written as two blocks of four, e.g. 7222 1234.

The old GPO had an "official" way to read out certain numbers where there were double/triple digits. For example, 3000 would be spoken as "three, oh, double oh." One or two operators would even get quite school-marm-ish if anyone dared to ask for "three, triple oh" or (horror of horrors [Linked Image]) "three thousand." A number such as 22222 using their style would be "two, double two, double two."


Quote
Of note, is the European standard of
displaying values of electronics,
EG 1R5 is a 1.5 ohm resistor, 2K2 is 2200 Ohms.
That format has gradually crept into British usage since the 1970s as well, although I'm not keen on it myself. The "nano" prefix (most often used on capacitance values) started to be used about the same time as well and is now very common here, e.g. 10nF instead of 0.01uF.

[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-14-2003).]