How to type Pound Sign

Pound Sign is not the only name it goes by: people look for £ as british pound too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.

£ lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Sc, a currency symbol. Formatting libraries recognise it when rendering money. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number terminator, so it sits beside a number without breaking its direction.

What Pound Sign is used for

In mathematical notation £ is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\mathsterling$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.

Unicode publishes a second list of names for £ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are currency, egp and gbp. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Pound Sign is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.

What £ gets confused with

£ has a twin that is a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.

# (U+0023) is the number sign, and in the United States it is what "pound sign" usually means: the key on a telephone keypad, the one a voicemail prompt asks for. In Britain and Ireland the pound sign is this page's character, the currency one. The two are not variants of each other and no font substitution connects them, so a search for "pound sign" is two different questions depending on who is asking.

What Unicode says about Pound Sign

The standard recognises £ under another name as well: pound sterling, Irish punt, lira, etc.. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.

Unicode annotates £ directly. Against U+00A3 the code chart carries the note “Not to be confused with the unit of weight”. It adds: glyph may have one or two crossbars, in distinction from 20A4. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.

The code chart points from £ to Turkish Lira, lira sign (U+20A4) and roman semuncia sign (U+10192). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Pound Sign looks nearly right but not quite.

How Pound Sign behaves in software

£ takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.

What people ask about Pound Sign

Every way to write Pound Sign

Encodings and escapes for Pound Sign (£)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+00A3
Decimal	163
UTF-8 bytes	C2 A3
UTF-16 bytes	00 A3
HTML entity	£
HTML numeric	£ or £
CSS	\00A3
JavaScript	\u00A3
Python	\u00A3
URL-encoded	%C2%A3
LaTeX, in prose	\pounds
LaTeX, in maths mode	$\mathsterling$
SVG	00A3.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If £ arrives as £

That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 A3 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00A3.