Pound sign

£
Pound sign
In Unicode	U+00A3 £ POUND SIGN (£)
Currency
Currency	Pound
Graphical variants
￡
U+FFE1 ￡ FULLWIDTH POUND SIGN
Different from
Different from	U+20A4 ₤ LIRA SIGN U+0023 # NUMBER SIGN
Category

The pound sign (£) is the symbol for the pound unit of sterling – the currency of the United Kingdom and its associated Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories and previously of Great Britain and of the Kingdom of England. The same symbol is used for other currencies called pound, such as the Egyptian and Syrian pounds. The sign may be drawn with one or two bars depending on personal preference, but the Bank of England has used the one-bar style exclusively on banknotes since 1975.

In the United States, "pound sign" refers to the symbol # (number sign). In Canada, "pound sign" can mean £ or #.

The symbol derives from the upper case

It is not known for certain when the horizontal line or lines, which indicate an abbreviation,[a] first came to be drawn through the L. However, there is in the Bank of England Museum a cheque dated 7 January 1661 with a clearly discernible £ sign. By the time the Bank was founded in 1694 the £ sign was in common use.^[3]

However, the simple letter L, in lower- or uppercase, was used to represent the pound in printed books and newspapers until well into the 19th century.^[4] In the blackletter type used until the seventeenth century,^[5] the letter L is rendered as ${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {L}}}$.

When used for sterling, the pound sign is placed before the numerals (e.g., £12,000) and separated from the following digits by no space or only a

In Canadian English, the symbol £ is called the pound sign. The symbol # has several uses and is sometimes called the pound sign too, though it is most often known as the number sign.^[9] (Telephone instructions for equipment manufactured in the United States often call # the pound key.)

In American English, the term "pound sign" usually refers to the symbol # (number sign), and the corresponding telephone key is called the "pound key".^[10] (As in Canada, the # symbol has many other uses.)

Banknotes issued by the

In the eighteenth-century Caslon metal fonts, the pound sign was identical to an italic uppercase J, rotated 180 degrees.^{[14][failed verification]}

• Egypt: Egyptian pound
• Falkland Islands: Falkland Islands pound
• Gibraltar: Gibraltar pound
• Guernsey: Guernsey pound
• Isle of Man: Manx pound
• Jersey: Jersey pound
• Saint Helena: Saint Helena pound
• South Sudan: South Sudanese pound
• Sudan: Sudanese pound
• Syria: Syrian pound
• United Kingdom: Pound sterling

• American Colonies:
  • Connecticut pound
  • Delaware pound
  • Georgia pound
  • Maryland pound
  • New Hampshire pound
  • New Jersey pound
  • New York pound
  • North Carolina pound
  • Pennsylvania pound
  • Rhode Island pound
  • South Carolina pound
  • Virginia pound
• Australia: Australian pound
• The Bahamas: Bahamian pound
• Bermuda: Bermudian pound
• British Mandatory Palestine: Palestine pound
• Canada: Canadian pound
  • New Brunswick pound
  • Nova Scotian pound
  • Prince Edward Island pound
• Cyprus: Cypriot pound
• Fiji: Fijian pound
• The Gambia: Gambian pound
• Ghana: Ghanaian pound
• Ireland: Irish pound
• Israel: Israeli pound
• Malta:
  Maltese pound
• Newfoundland: Newfoundland pound
• New Zealand: New Zealand pound
• Rhodesia: Rhodesian pound
• South Africa: South African pound
• Tonga: Tongan pound
• Western Samoa: Western Samoan pound
• Yemen : Yemeni dinar

In the

The logo of the UK Independence Party, a British political party, is based on the pound sign,^[18] symbolising the party's opposition to adoption of the euro and to the European Union generally.

A symbol that appears to be a double-barred pound sign is used as the logo of the record label Parlophone. In fact this is a stylised version of a Fraktur L (${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {L}}}$), standing for Lindström (the firm's founder Carl Lindström).

The pound sign was used as an uppercase letter (the lowercase being ⟨ſ⟩, long s) to signify the sound [ʒ] in the early 1993–1995 version of the Turkmen Latin alphabet.^[19]

• Latin letter L with stroke Ł ł
• Semuncia 𐆒
• Category:Currency symbols