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The pound sign ("₤" or later more commonly in the UK "£") is the symbol for the pound sterling – the currency of the United Kingdom (UK) and its crown dependencies (see Manx pound, Jersey pound, Guernsey pound) – and for the related currencies issued by certain British Overseas Territories (see Gibraltar pound, Falkland Islands pound, Saint Helena pound). The same symbol is (or was) used for currencies of the same name in some other countries and territories: the Cypriot pound, sometimes the Egyptian pound, and, formerly, the Irish pound, Australian pound, New Zealand pound, South African pound and Rhodesian pound, as well as others. (There are other countries whose currency is called "the pound", but these do not use the £ symbol; see Pound (currency).)

Both symbols derive from librum, the basic Roman unit of weight (about 0.329 kg), 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'.

The pound sign, like the dollar sign ("$"), is usually placed before the number (i.e. "£12,000" and not "12,000£"), and is usually not separated from the following number, or is separated only by 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).

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 ₤.

The £ character is accessible using AltGr+Shift+4 on a modern US-International keyboard

The PC UK keyboard layout has the "£" symbol on the 3 number key, where an American keyboard has the number sign ("#").

On a US-International keyboard, the symbol can be accessed with the key combination AltGr+Shift+4.

The symbol "£" is in the MacRoman character set, and so can be generated on most Mac OS keyboard layouts, typically through Option+3. Under Microsoft Windows, it can be accessed through the Alt codes 0163 or 156.

• Currency sign

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