Currency names should not be capitalized in normal circumstances, not even the euro. The "euro" in particular confuses a lot of people, because every other word that begins with e-u-r-o requires a capital.

"Euroland", however, is a proper noun - it's an ad-hoc place name - and so ought to have a capital letter.

Agree with Steve. It's dollar, pound, euro, etc., but Euroland.

Without wishing to be pedantic, the following is from Wiki:

The meaning of proper noun capitalization is uniqueness within an implicit context, that is, it provides a name to an instance of a general type when the instance is unique within an implicit context. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_nouns#Pro...

Could it not be argued that the implicit context here is currency, and the uniqueness is the unit thereof e.g. D(d)ollar.

I couldn't care less either way, but I am writing an important report and using facts and figures from various sources some of which capitalise and some don't. It's beginning to bug me.

The Federal Reserve writes dollar.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pf/pdf/pf_2.pdf

The New York Times writes dollar.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/times...

I write dollar. :-)

Who exactly writes Dollar?

People writing German? (-:

I agree that in English it's dollar, pound, peso, franc, and yes, also euro.

Unless you name your child or your dog Dollar ...

Also agreed, even if it somehow seems the name of a currency should be a proper noun. And lest you be tempted, ciggy, it's also "pound sterling" (all lowercase) and "Swiss franc" (uppercase only on the nationality).

The ECB uses "euros", as is recommended by EU style guides.

That also clears up the next question, about the plural.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issue... (including the following section on Irish usage).

@ ciggy

You say: "Wiki seems to use both forms arbitrarily."

Wiki does a lot of things arbitrarily. That's because it's written by thousands of different authors and has no style guide of its own. And many of its English-language articles are clearly written by non-natives. It has absolutely no status as a guide to usage.

FWIW, English Scrabble allows names of currencies, so they can't be proper nouns, can they?
does anybody happen to know the German Scrabble rules, are you allowed to use Rubel, Lire, Dong, etc.?

Scrabble: I am uninformed. In my family, the only rule is that the word has to be in the dictionary.

#9
Apparently the rules of English Scrabble are now being altered to permit the use of proper nouns.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8604625.stm

#0,#8

Consistency can indeed not be guaranteed on Wikipedia, but it does have its own style guide, which is aimed at editors rather than readers. It can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual....

This page contains links to more detailled pages. The relevant link is probably
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual...
which, among other things, states :
The names of currencies, currency subdivisions, coins and banknotes should not be capitalised except where normal capitalisation rules require this (for example, at the start of a sentence).

When called on to use a plural with the euro, use the standard English plurals and not the "legislative" plurals (ten euros and fifty cents, not ten euro and fifty cent). In adjectival use, no plural form is generally used, but rather a hyphenated form: (a two-euro pen, a ten-dollar meal, a ten-cent cigar).

Wikipedia rules sometimes specifically permit lack of consistency between (rather than within) articles; for instance American spelling is normally used for American topics, and British spelling is usually used for British topics.
The amount of discussion and review that goes on behind the scenes on Wikipedia would probably surprise some people.

For instance: here is some of the discussion on the plural of "euro":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Euro/Archiv...

When considering Wikipedia articles, it may also help to look at the project assessments on the discussion page. For instance, if you look on the discussion page for the Euro article, you will see that a number of projects have rated it as "B"-class (which is above classes "C", "Start" and "Stub" but below classes "A", "good article" and "featured article").
This should mean that, at the time it was assessed, the article was judged to meet the following requirements:
1.The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations where necessary.
2.The article reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies.
3.The article has a defined structure.
4.The article is reasonably well-written. The prose contains no major grammatical errors and flows sensibly, but it certainly need not be "brilliant". The Manual of Style need not be followed rigorously.
5.The article contains supporting materials where appropriate.
6.The article presents its content in an appropriately accessible way.