on 31 March 1999 with the opening of the une devise pour l'Europe contest's official website managed by France Telecom. The website featured pedagogic files, created by the operation's general Office located at the Caen Memorial, and teachers oriented pitches and registration forms available in the eleven official European languages (plus Catalan). The English-language version, called "A motto for Europe", had a website. The contest's slogan was "The only prize will be to write a page of Europe's History" (La seule récompense sera d’avoir écrit une page d’histoire de l'Europe). A motto for Europe (1999–2000) In September 1999, a contest was held at the start of the 1999–2000 school year to invent a motto for the European Union. 2,575 classes were involved, with students ranging from ages ten to nineteen. The main rule was that the motto had to consist of a sentence of no more than twelve words, with an accompanying explanation of no more than 1,500 characters written in the class's local language. An English version of the explanation was also required, since the teachers used this language to communicate between themselves. National and European winners were selected the following year. By the contest deadline, 15 January 2000, 2016 mottoes had applied. A lexical analysis of this 400,000-word corpus was done by Taylor Nelson Sofres to reveal the most popular terms used by the young Europeans, which were: "Europe", "peace", "unity", "union", "together", "future", "difference", "hope", "solidarity", "egality", "liberty", "diversity", and "respect". This study was later used by the jury during the national selection. In February 2000, each member of EU-15's media partner managed a top 10 national mottoes selection to later submit it to a second jury in charge of the European selection. These 142 mottoes were all translated in the 11 official European languages. On 11 and 12 April 2000, the European Media Jury based at the Memorial of Caen, chose 7 mottoes among the late February selection (one voice per country). Those were next submitted to a final European Grand Jury in Brussels. Proclamation at the European Parliament (2000) On 4 May 2000 almost 500 schoolchildren from fifteen classes of the EU-15 (top class of each national selection) were gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels to assist the proclamation of the motto chosen that day by the 15-member Grand Jury including former Chancellor of Austria Franz Vranitzky, former Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Susanna