The symbol derives from the upper case Latin letter, representing libra pondo, the basic unit of weight in the Roman Empire, which in turn is derived from the Latin word, libra, meaning scales or a balance. The pound became an English unit of weight and in England became defined as the tower pound of sterling silver. According to the Royal Mint Museum: However, the simple letter L, in lower- or uppercase, was used to represent the pound sterling in printed books and newspapers until well into the 19th century. In the blackletter type used until the seventeenth century, the letter L is rendered as.
Usage
The pound sign is placed before the number and separated from the following digits by no space or only a thin space.
Other English variants
Canadian English
In Canadian English the symbols and are both called the pound sign, but the # is also known as the 'number sign' and as the 'noughts-and-crosses board'.
US English
In American English, the term "pound sign" usually refers to the symbol , and the corresponding telephone key is called the "pound key".
Banknotes issued by the Bank of England since 1975 have only used the single bar style as a pound sign. The Bank used both the two-bar style and the one-bar style more or less equally since 1725 until 1971, intermittently and sometimes concurrently. In typography, the symbols are allographs style choices when used to represent the pound and both use the same POUND SIGN Unicode code point,.
Other
In the eighteenth-century Caslon metal fonts, the pound sign was identical to an italic uppercase J, rotated 180 degrees.
In the Unicode standard, the symbol £ is called POUND SIGN and the symbol ₤ is the LIRA SIGN. These have respective code points: Unicode notes that the "lira sign" is not widely used and was added due to both it and the pound sign being available on HP printers, and also states that the preferred sign for lira is the pound sign. The encoding of the £ symbol in position xA3 was first standardised by ISO Latin-1 in 1985. Position xA3 was used by the Digital Equipment CorporationVT220 terminal, Mac OS Roman, the Amstrad CPC, the Commodore Amiga and the Acorn Archimedes. Many early computers used a variant of ASCII with one of the less-frequently used characters replaced by the £. The UK national variant of ISO 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 instead of. MSDOS on the IBM PC originally used a non-standard 8-bit character setCode page 437 in which the £ symbol was encoded as x9C; adoption of ISO character codes only came later with Microsoft Windows. The Atari ST also used position x9C. The HP Laserjet used position xBA for the £ symbol, while most other printers used x9C. The BBC Ceefax system which dated from 1976 encoded the £ as x23. The ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro used x60 . The Commodore 64 used x5C while the Oric used x5F. IBM's EBCDIC code page 037 uses xB1 for the £ while its code page 285 uses x5B. ICL's 1900-series mainframes used a six-bit encoding for characters, loosely based on BS 4730, with the £ symbol represented as octal 23.
Entry methods
Typewriters
s produced for the British market included a "£" sign from the earliest days, though its position varied widely. A 1921 advertisement for an Imperial Typewriters model D, for example shows a machine with two modifier shifts, with the "£" sign occupying the FIG shift position on the key for letter "B". But the advertisement notes that "We make special keyboards containing symbols, fractions, signs, etc., for the peculiar needs of Engineers, Builders, Architects, Chemists, Scientists, etc., or any staple trade." On Latin-alphabet typewriters lacking a "£" symbol type element, a reasonable approximation could be made by typing an "f" over an "L".
On Microsoft Windows, Linux and Unix, the UK keyboard layout has the "£" symbol on the 3 number key and is typed using:
On a US-International keyboard in Windows, the "£" can be entered using:
On a US-International keyboard in Linux and Unix, the "£" can be entered using:
followed by
In Windows, it can also be generated through the Alt keycodes, although the results vary depending on factors such as the locale, codepage and OS version:
+
+
The Character Map utility and Microsoft Word's Insert Symbol commands may also be used to enter this character.
MacOS
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:
On UK Apple Mac keyboards, this is reversed, with the "£" symbol on the number 3 key, typed using:
Android
Press and hold the local currency sign : a popup box presenting an array of currency signs is presented from which the £ may be chosen.
Other uses
The logo of the UK Independence Party, a British political party, is based on the pound sign, symbolising the party's opposition to adoption of the euro and to the European Union generally. A symbol that appears to be a double-barred pound sign is used as the logo of the British record labelParlophone. In fact this is a stylised version of a blackletter L, standing for Lindström. The pound sign was used as an uppercase letter signifying in the early 1993–1995 version of the Turkmen Latin alphabet.
