| £ | |
|---|---|
Pound sign | |
| In Unicode | U+00A3 £POUND SIGN (£) |
| Currency | |
| Currency | Pound |
| Graphical variants | |
| ￡ | |
| U+FFE1 ￡FULLWIDTH POUND SIGN | |
| Different from | |
| Different from | U+20A4 ₤LIRA SIGN U+0023 #NUMBER SIGN |
 Category | |
Thepound sign (£) is thesymbol for the poundunit ofsterling – thecurrency of theUnited Kingdom and its associatedCrown Dependencies andBritish Overseas Territories and previously ofGreat Britain and of theKingdom of England. The same symbol is used for other currencies calledpound, such as theEgyptian andSyrian pounds. The sign may be drawn with one or two bars depending on personal preference, but theBank of England has used the one-bar style exclusively on banknotes since 1975.
In the United States, "pound sign" refers to the symbol# (number sign). In Canada, "pound sign" can mean£ or#.
The symbol derives from the upper caseLatin letterL, representinglibra pondo, the basic unit of weight in theRoman Empire, which in turn is derived from theLatin wordlibra, meaningscales or a balance. The pound became anEnglish unit of weight and in England became defined as thetower pound (equivalent to 350 grams) ofsterling silver.[1][2] According to theRoyal Mint Museum:
It is not known for certain when the horizontal line or lines, which indicate an abbreviation,[a] first came to be drawn through the L. However, there is in theBank of England Museum a cheque dated 7 January 1661 with a clearly discernible £ sign. By the time the Bank was founded in 1694 the £ sign was in common use.[3]
However, the simple letter L, in lower- or uppercase, was used to represent the pound in printed books and newspapers until well into the 19th century.[4] In theblackletter type used until the seventeenth century,[5] the letter L is rendered as.
When used for sterling, the pound sign is placed before the numerals (e.g., £12,000) and separated from the following digits by no space or only athin space. In the UK, the sign is used without any prefix. InEgypt andLebanon, a disambiguating letter is added (E£[6] or £E[7] and£L[8] respectively). In international banking andforeign exchange operations, the symbol is rarely used: theISO 4217 currency code (e.g., GBP, EGP, etc.) is preferred.[b]
InCanadian English, the symbol£ is called the pound sign. The symbol# has several uses and is sometimes called the pound sign too, though it is most often known as the number sign.[9] (Telephone instructions for equipment manufactured in the United States often call# the pound key.)
InAmerican English, the term "pound sign" usually refers to the symbol# (number sign), and the corresponding telephone key is called the "pound key".[10] (As in Canada, the # symbol has manyother uses.)
Banknotes issued by theBank of England since 1975 have used only the single bar style as a pound sign.[11][12][13] The bank used both the two-bar style (₤) and the one-bar style (£) (and sometimes a figure without any symbol whatever) more or less equally from 1725 to 1971 intermittently and sometimes concurrently.[11] Intypography, the symbols areallographs – style choices – when used to represent the pound; consequently fonts useU+00A3 £POUND SIGN (Unicode)code point irrespective of which style chosen, (notU+20A4 ₤LIRA SIGN despite its similarity). It is afont design choice on how to draw the symbol at U+00A3.[13] Although mostcomputer fonts do so with one bar, the two-bar style is not rare, as may be seen in the illustration above.
In the eighteenth-centuryCaslon metal fonts, the pound sign was an italic uppercaseJ, rotated 180 degrees.[14]
In theUnicode standard, the pound sign is encoded atU+00A3 £POUND SIGN (£)[15] Whether the glyph is drawn with one or two bars is atype designer's choice as explained above; the key point is that the code is constant irrespective of the presentation chosen.[c]
The encoding of the £ symbol in position xA3 (16310) was first standardised byISO Latin-1 (an "extended ASCII") in 1985. Position xA3 was used by theDigital Equipment CorporationVT220 terminal,Mac OS Roman,Amstrad CPC,Amiga, andAcorn Archimedes.
Many early computers (limited to a 7-bit, 128-positioncharacter set) used a variant ofASCII with one of the less-frequently used characters replaced by the £. The UK national variant ofISO 646 was standardised as BS 4730 in 1985. This code was identical to ASCII except for two characters: x23 encoded£ instead of#, while x7E encoded‾ (overline) instead of~ (tilde).MS-DOS on theIBM PC originally used a proprietary 8-bit character setCode page 437 in which the £ symbol was encoded as x9C; adoption of theISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1") standard code xA3 only came later withMicrosoft Windows. TheAtari ST also used position x9C. TheHP LaserJet used position xBA (ISO/IEC 8859-1:º) for the £ symbol, while most other printers used x9C. The BBCCeefax system which dated from 1976 encoded the £ as x23. TheSinclairZX80 andZX81 characters sets used x0C (ASCII:form feed). TheZX Spectrum and theBBC Micro used x60 (ASCII:`,grave). TheCommodore 64 used x5C (ASCII:\) while theOric computers used x5F (ASCII:_).IBM'sEBCDIC code page 037 uses xB1 for the £ while its code page 285 uses x5B.ICL's1900-series mainframes used a six-bit (64-position character set) encoding for characters, loosely based on BS 4730, with the £ symbol represented asoctal 23 (hex 13, dec 19).
The logo of theUK Independence Party, a Britishpolitical party, is based on the pound sign,[18] symbolising the party's opposition to adoption of theeuro and to theEuropean Union generally.
The pound sign was used as an uppercase letter (the lowercase being⟨ſ⟩,long s) to signify the sound[ʒ] in the early 1993–1995 version of theTurkmen Latin alphabet.[19]
[...] Currency Symbols: U+20A0–U+20CF [...] Lira Sign. A separate currency sign U+20A4 LIRA SIGN is encoded for compatibility with theHP Roman-8 character set, which is still widely implemented in printers. In general, U+00A3 POUND SIGN may be used for both the various currencies known as pound (or punt) and the currencies known as lira. [...]
