This article is about the currency symbol. For the North American usage, see Number sign.
- See also: Pound (currency).
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£
Punctuation
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| apostrophe |
( - ' ) |
| brackets |
(( )), ([ ]), ({ }), (< >) |
| colon |
( : ) |
| comma |
( , ) |
| dashes |
( -, -, -, - ) |
| ellipses |
( -, ... ) |
| exclamation mark |
( ! ) |
| full stop (period) |
( . ) |
| guillemets |
( « » ) |
| hyphen |
( -, - ) |
| question mark |
( - ) |
| quotation marks |
( „ “, „ “ ) |
| semicolon |
( ; ) |
| slash/stroke |
( / ) |
| solidus |
( - ) |
| Word dividers |
| spaces |
( ) (-) (-) ( ) (-) |
| interpunct |
( · ) |
| General typography |
| ampersand |
( & ) |
| at sign |
( @ ) |
| asterisk |
( * ) |
| backslash |
( \ ) |
| bullet |
( - ) |
| caret |
( ^ ) |
| currency |
generic: |
( ¤ ) |
| specific: |
¢, $, -, £, ¥, -, - |
| daggers |
( -, - ) |
| degree |
( ° ) |
| inverted exclamation mark |
( ¡ ) |
| inverted question mark |
( ¿ ) |
| number sign |
( # ) |
| numero sign |
( - ) |
| percent (etc.) |
( %, -, - ) |
| pilcrow |
( ¶ ) |
| prime |
( - ) |
| section sign |
( § ) |
| tilde/swung dash |
( ~ ) |
| umlaut/diaeresis |
( ¨ ) |
| underscore/understrike |
( _ ) |
| vertical/pipe/broken bar |
( |, ¦ ) |
| Uncommon typography |
| asterism |
( - ) |
| index/fist |
( - ) |
| therefore sign |
( - ) |
| because sign |
( - ) |
| interrobang |
( - ) |
| irony mark |
( - ) |
| lozenge |
( - ) |
| reference mark |
( - ) |
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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 currencies of the same name in some other countries and territories; there are other countries whose currency is called "the pound", but that do not use the £ symbol.
Both symbols derive from capital "L", standing for librum, 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). Other nations, such as Syria, continue to use the lira, and thus the lira sign, as denotation of their currency.[citation needed]
Computing
Codepoints
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 ₤.
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 sometimes called "pound sign" in non-sterling countries.
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, where an American keyboard has the number sign ("#").
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. 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 '-'.
See also
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