The
pound sign ("
£" or "
₤") is the symbol for the
pound sterling — the currency of the
United Kingdom (UK). The same symbol is (or was) used for similarly named currencies in some other countries and territories, such as the
Irish pound,
Gibraltar pound and Italian
lira; there are other countries, including
Lebanon, whose currency is called "the pound", but that do not use the £ symbol.
The symbol derives from capital "L", standing for libra, the basic Roman unit of weight, which is in turn derived from the Latin word for scales or a balance. The pound became a British unit of weight, and the pound currency unit was so named because it was originally the value of 1 tower pound (~334 g) of fine (pure) silver.
In English-language use, the pound sign is placed before the number (i.e. "£12,000" and not ), and separated from the following number by no space or a thin space.
The symbol "₤" is also known as the lira sign. In Italy, prior to the adoption of the euro, the symbol was used as an alternative to the more usual L to indicate prices in lire (but always with double horizontal lines).
Computing
Codepoints
The pound sign has
Unicode code point . It has a
HTML entity reference of £ and has an XML decimal entity reference of £.
The lira sign has Unicode code point , decimal entity reference ₤. Unicode notes that this is not widely used, and the preferred sign for lira is the pound sign.
Entry methods
Prior to the introduction of the
IBM PC there was no unique accepted standard for entering, displaying, printing, or storing the £ sign in the UK computer industry. On personal computers prior to the PC the "#" key was often used; sometimes it was displayed on screen as "#", but many printers could be set up to print "£" where "#" was sent to the printer by an application program. Keying in, storing, displaying, and printing the sign often required special setup. The "#" sign is referred to as the "
hash symbol" in the UK, but it is sometimes called the "pound sign" in non-Sterling countries (though in reference to the unit of weight, not the unit of currency). It is also known as the number symbol or key.
The BBC Micro used a variant of ASCII that replaced the backtick ("`", character 96, hex 60) with the pound sign (ISO/IEC 8859 had not yet been standardised, and it was advantageous to have commonly-used characters available in the lower, 7-bit ASCII table), denoted as CHR$96 or (hex) CHR$&60. Since the BBC Micro used a Teletext mode as standard, this means that the pound sign is in the 7-bit ASCII variant used on Teletext systems such as Ceefax, ORACLE and Teletext Ltd too.
The PC UK keyboard layout has the "£" symbol on the 3 number key and is typed using Shift+3.
The symbol "£" is in the MacRoman character set and can be generated on most non-UK Mac OS keyboard layouts which do not have a dedicated key for it, typically through Option+3. On UK Apple Mac keyboards, this is reversed, with the "£" symbol on the number 3 key, typed using Shift+3, and the number sign ("#") generated by Option+3. Under Microsoft Windows it can be generated through the Alt keycodes 0163 and 156, and in MS-DOS by Alt-156.
The Compose key sequence is 'L' and '-'.
On Latin-alphabet typewriters lacking a "£" symbol type element, a reasonable approximation can be made by typing an upper-case "L", backspacing, then typing a lower-case "f" over it.
See also
Currency sign
L with stroke
Pound (currency)
References
Category:Currency signs
Category:Punctuation
