Pound sign
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- See also: Pound (currency).
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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 librum, the basic Roman unit of weight, in turn derived from the Latin word for scales or 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. Incidentally, the pre-decimalisation penny (of which 240 made £1) took the symbol d from the Latin word denarius, the Roman 'penny'.
In English-language use, the pound sign, like the dollar 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 Turkey and Syria continue to use the lira, and thus the lira sign, as denotation of their currency.[citation needed]
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[edit] Computing
[edit] 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 ₤.
[edit] 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 avaiable 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 '-'.
[edit] See also
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