Type E — French
- Pins
- 2
- Spacing
- 19 mm
- Pin length
- 19 mm
- Rated
- 16 A
- Earthed
- yes
Drawn from pin dimensions at one scale across the whole site — hold a plug against the screen and it should look familiar.
The French answer to earthing, also standard in Belgium, Slovakia and Tunisia: two round 4.8 mm pins on 19 mm centres, with the earth arranged backwards by everyone else's logic — a male earth pin protrudes from the round-recessed socket and mates with a hole in the plug face. That socket-side pin fixes the plug's orientation, so Type E is inherently polarized where its Schuko cousin is not. Rated 16 A on 230 V, plenty for kettles and heaters.
What fits a Type E socket
Besides its own plug: Type C, Type F. Europlugs fit but stay unearthed. Most 'Type F' plugs sold today are hybrid CEE 7/7, carrying both the earth hole for E sockets and Schuko side strips — a pure side-clip F plug without the hole will not seat on the socket's earth pin.
Facts verified against IEC World Plugs — Type E. Prose is our own.
Where you'll meet it
- Belgium230 V
- Benin220 V
- Burkina Faso220 V
- Burundi220 V
- Cameroon220 V
- Central African Republic220 V
- Chad220 V
- Comoros220 V
- Côte d'Ivoire230 V
- Czechia230 V
- Democratic Republic of the Congo220 V
- Denmark230 V
- Djibouti220 V
- Equatorial Guinea220 V
- Faroe Islands230 V
- France230 V
- French Guiana220 V
- Greenland230 V
- Guadeloupe230 V
- Laos230 V
- Liberia120/220 V
- Madagascar127/220 V
- Martinique220 V
- Monaco230 V
- Mongolia220 V
- Morocco127/220 V
- Niger220 V
- Poland230 V
- Republic of the Congo230 V
- Réunion220 V
- Rwanda230 V
- Saint Vincent and the Grenadines230 V
- Senegal230 V
- Slovakia230 V
- Syria220 V
- Timor-Leste220 V
- Tunisia230 V