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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 for some
currencies of the same name in other countries. 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 an English 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
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
code page 437.
See also
★
Currency sign