Talk:Pound sign

£ or ₤
what is the deal with pound signs having double crosses or not?

anyone know why we use single cross these days..something to do with keyboards?


 * I don't think it's significant, just a stylistic difference like using a different font. For what it's worth I hand-write pound signs with two cross-bars (I'm 24 if we think date might have something to do with it). PeteVerdon 10:17, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

The text uses the double cross for both examples although it is describing the diffence between two versions. This needs to be corrected.
 * This has been corrected. The Bank of England used the double-crossed variant from 1919 to 1963, it is now totally obsolete. See Pound sign. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:54, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

L as an alternative?
The article states that the letter L is used rarly as an alternative. I have never seen this. It may have been in the past, but I doubt many people today would recognise this use.81.178.254.17 22:14, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

I have never seen this used and I live in England! The original author might of got mixed up with Lb often used for "Pound weight". I am removing it with this discussion as a reason. If anyone has any more evidence of it being used then cool put it back on with the evidence. htmlland.net 15:50, 22 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually I have seen the L used for pound. It's been a while now, but back in the day when computers had issues displaying extended ASCII, the pound symbol was sometimes substituted with an L--so L36 meant £36. --Rdiggle 11:12, 30 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Just an L it isn't very common. However, in my experience, it isn't uncommon to see L (an 'L' with a strike through) (when it is hand written).  The pound sign is just an L with a strike through, the curl a the top and the loop at the bottom are merely a common decoration.  AskOxford has quite a good explanation of the origin (http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutsymbols/poundsign?view=uk).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.163.165.185 (talk) 12:30, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

This is why in the 60's, 'pounds, shillings and pence' could be rendered as 'LSD' to the amusement of hippies. Not used anymore, though, it was a pre-decimal currency practice.


 * I have seen in very old news papers, circa the 1860s, a value of, for instance, seven pounds, ten shillings and six pence expressed as 7l. 10s. 6d. inclusive of three full stops, and with the lower case L in Italics, presumably so it wouldn't be taken for the numeral one. I wish I could say it was in the Times, but I can't remember.  (However, even I, having grown up using £sd, had to do a double take, as it was never so written in my time; the pound currency symbol always preceded the value in pounds, and only shillings and pence were followed by their currency symbols.  (In fact, the double stroke pound symbol was still in favour over the more modern single stroke.  Thus, the same amount when I started working as a clerk in the early 1950s would have been written ₤7·10·6).
 * Christian Gregory (talk) 01:18, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

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

Please specify which variant of "extended ASCII" this refers to (Latin-1 or whatever). (Stefan2 21:50, 17 April 2007 (UTC))


 * I believe it was 156 in the original IBM codepage used in DOS. The value is 163 in modern codepages. --Rdiggle 11:12, 30 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Why not this fact include in the article? Henrilebec (talk) 08:41, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Because the article is about the pound sign, not about the history of character encoding? Nevertheless, I have inserted parenthesised notes in the relevant sentence of Pound sign  so that it now reads "The encoding of the £ symbol in position xA3 (15610) was first standardised by ISO Latin-1 (an "extended ASCII") in 1985. "  --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:36, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Incorrect Display
this page displays incorrectly in IE7. - the right box floats over text. can someone fix it?
 * I'm sorry, but only the Microsoft team can deal with problems arising from IE7's messed up standards 'support'. 81.108.97.33 01:42, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Troy pound? Tower pound!
The article states that the original basis of the pound Sterling is one Troy pound of silver. This seems very unlikely in terms of historical sequence (the English pound is mentioned centuries before any the Troy pound was established as a standard) and geographical origin. According to Adam Smith in 'The Wealth of Nations' the English penny was 1/240 of the "pound Tower weight". The pound Tower weight was 326 grams as contrasted with the Troy pound of 373 grams, so there is a discrepancy of over 14%. I have altered the article accordingly.

Agemegos 23:58, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Sterling silver
According to the article on sterling silver, sterling silver is first known in the 13th century. But the English pound as a unit of currency is attested from Saxon times. It therefore seems unlikely that sterling can be the original standard of fineness for the pound. Smith says (in 'The Wealth of Nations' that the original standard was one pound (Tower weight) of fine silver. I have altered the article accordingly.

Agemegos 00:06, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Before or After the Amount (Number)
I think the text should say that today the sign is usually written before the amount. I get the impression from old books and articles I have seen that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was more common to write the sign after the amount. Shulgi 20:54, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds right. Back when they just wrote a cursive lower-case l., that went after the amount just like shillings. But cites for the upper-case version? —  LlywelynII  23:12, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Merge with £ (currency)
Aren't they the same thing? $ redirects to dollar sign. And as far as I can tell, £ and £ (disambiguation) both redirects to £ (currency). So there isn't any other £. (by the way, to make things worse, Talk:£ (disambiguation) redirects like main space to Talk:£ (currency), but Talk:£ redirects to Talk:Pound sign!). --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 17:48, 15 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Makes sense to me --Rumping 11:47, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Why not say how to type it?
Hmm?--82.152.216.199 (talk) 22:51, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * WP:NOT. EdC (talk) 23:34, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I think one line hardly makes it a "how-to style manual of instructions". --82.152.216.199 (talk) 00:04, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * And here are some other articles SpySheriff, Inverted question mark and exclamation point, List of HD Enhanced PS2 games, Umlaut (diacritic). Next you'll be saying Carbon offset is a HOWTO for governments. Also, this page says how to enter the character in HTML- how is that any different?? --82.152.216.199 (talk) 00:13, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes; it describes its entity reference forms, which are standardised and factual. Also, I tried your supposed entry method and it didn't work.  EdC (talk) 23:54, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * It's not my method. Anyway, as you can see from the other articles, it is the done thing to post how to type some characters, so please stop removing information, thanks.--82.152.216.199 (talk) 13:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
 * BTW did you actually type the 0? If you do alt and 163 it won't work. it has to be alt + 0163--82.152.216.199 (talk) 13:06, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes; nothing happened. Perhaps you should mention what operating system you're using.  EdC (talk) 01:03, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Pound kg comparison
I removed "on Earth's surface" from the metric equivalence. The kilogram is a unit of mass, not force, so the comparison is valid anywhere. Rojomoke (talk) 13:28, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

The currency sign in Turkey
I have never seen the Lira sign used as currency in Turkey, maybe it's because I'm 24 years old, but still, it means that we haven't been using it at least so far. We used to use TL (Turkish Lira, Türk Lirası) now we are using YTL (New Turkish Lira, Yeni Türk Lirası) as we have changed the scale of the currency. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.225.73.246 (talk) 07:59, 15 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I wondered about this too, but wasn't sure enough to remove it. If you're Turkish and you've never seen it in 24 years then the current wording, which implies it's in regular use, certainly needs changing. With your local knowledge would you be able to find out whether the symbol was ever used in Turkey, and, if so, roughly when it went out of use? For now I have just tagged this claim (and the similar one for Syria) as needing a source to back it up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.150.101.159 (talk) 00:35, 25 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm Turkish too and I also never seen the Lira sign. Asked my mother, father, grandmothers, grandfathers; googled it: only sign for Turkish Lira is TL.


 * Thanks. On this evidence I have removed it. Now, any Syrians around?! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.134.12.139 (talk) 03:15, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

http://www.tcmb.gov.tr

This has been added and removed several times and I haven't seen a source cited. It isn't mentioned in the corresponding Turkish Wikipedia article Pound işareti. It is not mentioned in Turkish lira or in Türk lirası, both of which use '₺'. I can't see the symbol in any of the thumbnails of Turkish currency in c:Category:Banknotes of Turkey or c:Category:Coins of Turkey. It is mentioned in Lira without a proper citation, but I suspect that this is referring to the Italian lira (I remember seeing '£' in Italian streetmarkets). I will remove this, please do not restore it without citing an adequate source. Verbcatcher (talk) 19:01, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

When was the sign first recorded?
This article gives no hint as to how long the sign has been around. Reading about Shakespearean times, for example, one finds mentions of "£50 fines" and such, but I'm curious if people actually used this notation back then. Anyone have a clue? SergioGeorgini (talk) 22:01, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Here is a copy of the Limerick Chronicle from 1768: http://ulir.ul.ie/handle/10344/253
 * In this they just use "l." after the number like with "s." and "d." for shillings and pence, e.g. 500l. for £500. I don't know if this was common practise then, or if a pound sign wasn't available in the typeface they were using. --Zilog Jones (talk) 12:55, 3 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I've been doing a bit of digging around facsimiles available online, and as far as I can see fifty pounds was generally printed as "50l." until about 1820, while £50 is commonplace in the 1840s; but I would want to see more thorough research before stating this as fact. Mhkay (talk) 18:40, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Lira sign

 * "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 lire."

This paragraph in the lead section seems to be emphasising that the symbol with the double bar was used for lira. This contradicts the Unicode document referred to later in the article, which says that the double bar character was not widely used, and the single bar character was preferred. 86.176.211.86 (talk) 20:45, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The lira sign in Italy was very frequently written with two dashes, especially in handwriting, despite what that Unicode page may say. You can have a look yourself at what appeared on a standard Italian typewriter of the day: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8pq4w7Eq5-Q/TO1-tvtInwI/AAAAAAAABhs/z37dcQej-qs/s1600/IMG_0464.JPG 128.179.67.43 (talk) 16:47, 30 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Unicode doesn't say that the double-bar character was not widely used; it says that U+20A4 is not widely used, as U+00A3 is preferred. The chart shows U+20A4 with two bars, and U+00A3 with only one, but this isn't a specification of how the characters must look. See the relevant section of the Unicode Standard (in Unicode 6.1 it's section 15.1). --Zundark (talk) 13:30, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Explanation for Alt keycode 6556?
I constantly struggle with inputting this sign in Japanese Windows (which defaults to a US keyboard layout for Roman letter input). Depending on the application, codepage, language settings, IME, typeface/glyphs and similar unquantifiable things, many of the methods suggested work in some situations but not others (e.g. Alt+0163 often gives ｣, i.e. U+FF63, HALFWIDTH RIGHT CORNER BRACKET - note that 163 is the codepoint for this symbol in Shift JIS). However, although Alt+6556 works (sometimes), I can't figure out why it works at all. Is it 6556 decimal or 6556 hex, or some other representation?

Trying Unicode first... In decimal (6556), i.e. 0x199C in hex, this is ᦜ (U+199C, NEW TAI LUE LETTER HIGH LA). In hexadecimal (0x6556), i.e. 25942 in decimal, it is 敖 (U+6556, CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-6556).

For comparison: Alt+6554 gives Ü (U+00DC, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS, decimal 220) Alt+6555 gives ø (U+00F8, LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE, decimal 248) Alt+6556 gives £ (U+00A3, POUND SIGN, decimal 163) Alt+6557 gives Ø (U+00D8, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE decimal 216) Alt+6558 gives × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN, decimal 215)

... from which I conclude that it's nothing to do with Unicode. Instead, these characters appear in this order in codepage 850: Ü=154 ø=155 £=156 Ø=157 ×=158

Simple maths: 6556-156 = 6400 (0x1900), or 0x6556-156= 25786 (0x64BA). The latter seems rather random, so let's assume it's decimal. So the Alt+6556 code and similar appear to be "Code Page 850 plus 6400". But why?!

Ozaru (talk) 10:23, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Update: Spitzak claims that "on some setups any number equal to 156+n*256 will work" but the reasons for this, its validity and/or applicability are all still unclear. Ozaru (talk) 14:15, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Because the implementation does mod-256 with whatever number was typed (or equivalently does binary mask with 255) before turning it into a character!Spitzak (talk) 20:01, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

To add to this: in the OLD typesetting printing industry an inverted 'F' was also used for English pound signs especially IF it was missing from the set, of die cast letters! Just a story I know, but a printer advised me that this trick saved multiple 'L's, especially in printed fiscal publications! 'S' and 'F' were often mixed up in some very old medieval publications, or of poorly set out print runs, by either bad printers or apprentices, prior to inking, and/or proof read documents. It seems logical to accept this alternative use of 'F' in lower case especially to replace the (developing?) Pound symbol. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.28.204.172 (talk) 15:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Developing? 1661?? (See Pound sign). But to aid future readers, I have added a note to show what the letter L looked like in the blackletter font used at the time. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:28, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

For new visitors to this old material, just use Unicode because the Alt key method is effectively unpredictable nowadays, the world has moved on. When writing in latin characters, £ is U+A3; when writing in Kanji, there is a full-width version at U+FFE1. See Unicode input. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 21:42, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

'Just use Unicode' doesn't really work, though. Having tried the methods shown at Unicode input as suggested - even the  hack - they work in some apps but still do not allow the £ symbol to be input in the most basic text situations, e.g. command line, input boxes, メモ帳 (Notepad), or even the Wikipedia Edit screen I'm currently inside in my browser. This applies whether in Kanji mode or ’Latin' (i.e. halfwidth Romaji) input mode. The slow method to get £ is to type ポンド into the IME and then select from the various options shown (choosing the half-width version even though the IME warns it is 環境依存文字); the quicker method is to switch keyboard layout (via Windows+Space) to e.g. UK or US (I tried Thai, Chinese etc. and all fail): then Alt+0163 does at last work, reliably and consistently. Ozaru (talk) 08:04, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
 * But if you type Alt+0163, "just use Unicode" is exactly what you are doing: the leading zero tells Windows "treat this as a Unicode alt code, not a code page alt code". Have you tried Alt+0163 without switching layouts? (When you wrote above that you get HALFWIDTH RIGHT CORNER BRACKET, are you sure you remembered the leading zero because it would make more sense if did not.- --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 08:28, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Just to confirm: Alt+0163 (with the 0) produces the following results with the various keyboard layouts: Japanese keyboard ｣ Microsoft IME ｣ Microsoft Pinyin ｣ Thai Kedmanee ฃ US/UK £. QED. Ozaru (talk) 09:46, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

I have worked out that my belief that Alt+0nnn yields the Unicode codepoint at nnn10 was just wrong. It does no such thing – or rather when it does so, it is just a coincidence. The leading zero just means "chose the codepoint from the current windows code page; without the zero it means "use the current OEM code page". 0163 is the codepoint for £ on code page 1252 (the default for English); on the Japanese Windows code page it would have a different number – if indeed it is present at all (why would it be?).

I have proposed at talk:Unicode input that the "decimal input method" be deleted. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 09:37, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

# in US to mean pound weight
An anon editor deleted the statement in the lead that the # (ENUS:pound sign) means weight. I have seen grocery stores with produce priced at 50¢/# but I can't find any citation to support it. The same claim is made at pound (mass) but is also uncited. Can anyone oblige? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:50, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Early cheque displaying the pound symbol
The following page has an image of a cheque dated December 1660 (I can't work out the day) with a recognisable pound sign visible: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/museum/online-collections/banknotes/early-banknotes. This Wikipedia article quotes the Royal Mint Museum as saying the Bank of England Museum has a cheque dated 7 January 1661 with a clearly discernible £ sign. This is indeed what the Royal Mint Museum link says, and perhaps there is a second cheque dated 7 January 1661. However, it seems preferable to quote the Bank of England Museum and use the image from that page. I assume that since the author of the cheque died over 100 years ago that the image is not copyrighted. Danielklein (talk) 11:31, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Good find! The BoE caption says 8 December (which is what I see in the image as well). Are you suggesting that we 'acquire' the image itself? (as it is out of copyright and [at least in US law] a photograph of a document that is out of copyright does not itself have a new copyright), or just update the article with the more reliable source? I would certainly agree that we should do the latter for now and since you found it, you should have the honour of doing the update. I think we shall have to wp:AGF for the Mint and suspend disbelief that the BoE really does another cheque dated 7 Jan 1661 that they've not bothered to put on their website. Meanwhile I'll ask a question at the Commons helpdesk about liberating the BoE image. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:05, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Edit war over "GB£"
Regardless of whether the IP is or is not a banned user, they are actually correct in that the sentence though elsewhere the nonstandard form "GB£" may be seen is unsourced and suspect. I've tried to do a Google search for this, and wasn't able to find any usage of this non-standard form. If this is in use somewhere, then a reliable source for it should be provided. For now I've the citation needed tag, though with a different message for the reason. Sideswipe9th (talk) 23:23, 10 May 2023 (UTC)


 * That's who's already rapidly on his way to becoming an LTA. One of his major bugbears is removing GB£ from wherever its found on Wikipedia even when page views are minimal and it makes no sense to do so (e.g. stuff like this).
 * Now a sockmaster's preferences shouldn't influence us either way, which is too say that one of them wanting something added isn't by itself a reason not to include.
 * From a content perspective I suspect it can be sourced search engines can be a little wonky when symbols are involved as an occasional misrendering, but whether it's due for inclusion is trickier, and GB£ is a redirect that will get people where they need to go if searched for, so the choice may not matter much. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 02:20, 13 May 2023 (UTC)