Pound sign

Meaning and uses

The pound sign, used for the British pound sterling. Its L shape comes from libra, the Latin word for a pound in weight. In the US, # is also called the pound sign, which is a different character.

Unicode details

£ is the Unicode character named POUND SIGN, code point U+00A3, in the Latin-1 Supplement block. It was added in Unicode 1.1 in 1993, and Unicode classes it as a currency symbol (general category Sc).

It is not an emoji, so it keeps the colour and size of the text around it.

Tap a code to copy it:

How to type £

• On any device, tap the copy button above, then paste with a long press on a phone, Ctrl+V on Windows or Cmd+V on a Mac.
• In Microsoft Word on Windows, type 00A3 and then press Alt+X to turn the code into £.
• On a Mac, press Control+Cmd+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for “pound sign”.
• On Linux, most desktops accept Ctrl+Shift+U, then 00a3, then Space or Enter.
• In HTML, use £ or £. In a CSS content property, use "\00A3".