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).
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.
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.
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