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; there are other countries 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 pound Tower Weight (326 g) of fine (pure) silver.
In English-language use, the pound sign is placed before the number (i.e. "£12 000" and not "12 000£"), 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).
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The symbol "£" has Unicode code point U+00A3 (inherited from Latin-1).[1] It has a HTML entity reference of £ and has an XML decimal entity reference of £.
The symbol "₤" has Unicode code point U+20A4, decimal entity reference ₤.
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).
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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Abbreviation of Latin libra 'pound'. The symbol is derived from the medieval tradition of placing a stroke over a letter or letters of a word (in this case L) to indicate an abbreviation; when letters have ascenders like L, the stroke frequently passes through that ascender. £ is thus cognate with the pound sign #, which was similarly derived from lb with a stroke through the ascenders.
£
The practice of placing a stroke through the initial of the name for a currency as a symbol for that currency has been extended to other currency symbols, including several shown below.
Currency signs
Formerly used currency signs
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