Pound sign

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 for some other currencies of the same name in other countries. Rarely, L is used instead. 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 Imperial unit of weight, and the pound currency unit was so named because it was originally the value of 1 troy pound of sterling silver. Incidentally, the pre-decimalisation penny (of which 240 made £1) took the symbol d from the Latin word denarius, the Roman 'penny'.

The ISO 4217 currency code is GBP (from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code for the UK and the initial letter of pound). Occasionally the abbreviation UKP is also seen.

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 lira (but always with double horizontal lines).

The symbol "£" has Unicode code point U+00A3 (inherited from Latin-1)[1]. In HTML it can be entered as £ or £

The symbol "₤" has Unicode code point U+20A4. In HTML it can be entered as ₤

The symbol "£" has a value 156 in Extended ASCII.

See also

• Currency sign

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Wikipedia information about Pound sign This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Pound sign". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.