The pound sign started life as a letter. It's a capital L, written in the ornate hand of old accountants and crossed by one or two horizontal bars to show it's an abbreviation — the L standing for the Latin "libra," a Roman unit of weight, by way of "libra pondo," a pound by weight. The same root gives us the "lb" abbreviation for pounds on the scale, so weight and money share an ancestor here.
Sterling isn't its only claimant; historically the symbol served other pound and lira currencies, but its strong modern association is with the British pound.
The real trap for anyone working across dialects is the name. In Britain "pound sign" means £. In much of the United States "pound sign" means #, the hash mark, a leftover from when # denoted pounds of weight ("5# of flour"). Tell an American voicemail system to "press the pound sign" and nobody reaches for £. If there's any chance of confusion, name the characters precisely — "the sterling symbol" or "the hash" — rather than trusting that "pound sign" points at the same glyph on both sides of the Atlantic.
About Pound Sign
Pound Sign is the Unicode character £ at codepoint U+00A3 in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Pound Sign
To use the Pound Sign symbol (£) in HTML, insert the
entity £ directly into your markup. The decimal entity £ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\A3';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00A3' evaluates to £. In Python source, write '\u00A3'.
The character encodes to C2 A3 as UTF-8 bytes and 00A3 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 163.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.