Why Europeans switch commas with decimal points?

Question

I've noticed that Europeans switch commas with decimal points in numbers. For example, ten thousand dollars is written $10.000,00. Is that not incorrect? A decimal point is a point, not a comma, as I understand it.

Answer 1

I have no idea what your're talking about. €10,000.00 would be written in the same way as in the US.

Europeans do a lot of things differently - better - than the Americans. The British drive on the correct side of the road. The Germans know how to make a decent pint of beer. The Dutch understand which drugs are harmful and which aren't. The French....well....ok, you're right about the French. But mostly everyone writes numbers in the same way. If someone told you Europeans use a decimal point instead of a comma they're winding you up.

Answer 2

Perhaps the question we should be asking is why we switch decimal places for commas.

Haven't you noticed that we are the ones doing things differently -- not the rest of the world. We don't use the Celcius temperature scale. We still measture things in feet and miles instead of meters. We refuse to use foreign languages, and expect people to speak English -- even when we are in their country. We use a different electrical current than the rest of the world, and transmit TV with a different number of lines per inch.

And then we tell the rest of the world that they are wrong just because they do it differently.

Open your ewyes & see the truth. We are the ones who do things differently -- not them.

Answer 3

Europeans have been doing it long before there were United States. So it's the Americans that got it wrong... :)

Seriously, though, it's just a convention. There are other conventions, too. For example, in the U.S., 1,000,000,000 is referred to as billion; in Britain, it is milliard, while billion is 1,000,000,000,000...

Answer 4

Everyone has their own customs and way of doing things. Europeans also measure distance in different units as do Latin Americans, by the way. It is called meters.

Answer 5

I read in the paper that it looked more business-like, and they were going to start it in the US in telephone numbers.