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, such as the Irish pound, Gibraltar pound, Australian pound and the Italian lira. Several countries, including Lebanon and Egypt, call their currency "the pound" but do not use the £ symbol.
The symbol derives from a capital "L", representing libra, the basic unit of weight in the Roman Empire, which in turn is derived from the Latin name for scales or a balance. The pound became an English unit of weight and was so named because it originally had the value of one tower pound (~334 g) of fine (pure) silver.
The pound sign is placed before the number (i.e. "£12,000"), and separated from the following digits by no space or only a thin space.
The symbol ‹₤› was known as the lira sign in Italy, prior to the adoption of the euro. It was used as an alternative to the more usual L to show prices in lire.
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The pound sign has Unicode code point U+00A3 £ pound sign (inherited from Latin-1).[1] It has a HTML entity reference of £ and has an XML decimal entity reference of £.
The lira sign has Unicode code point U+20A4 ₤ lira sign, decimal entity reference ₤. Unicode notes that this is not widely used, and the preferred sign for lira is the pound sign.[2]
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). It is also known as the number symbol or key.
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. On a US-International keyboard, the "£" can be entered using Shift+AltGr+4 or Shift+Ctrl+Alt+4. Under Microsoft Windows it can also be generated through the Alt keycodes 0163 and 156, and in MS-DOS by Alt-156.
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.
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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