£

Pound sign

Symbol for the pound sterling (GBP), written before the amount with no space: £25. It has a single crossbar; the double-barred lira sign ₤ is a distinct character. Part of Latin-1, so it renders reliably everywhere, including very old systems and email clients.

Biography

Roman weights

Simply an ornate capital L — for the Latin libra, the Roman balance scale and its unit of weight. It is the same libra that gives pounds their abbreviation lb, so the currency symbol and the weight abbreviation are two descendants of one Roman word. The crossbar is an old abbreviation mark, marking the L as standing in for something longer.

Copy it anywhere

  • Symbol£
  • UnicodeU+00A3
  • HTML entity£
  • CSS content\00A3
  • JavaScript\u00A3
  • URL encoded%C2%A3
  • Windows Alt codeAlt+0163

Related symbols