Pound sign £

• Symbol first, no space: £20, £4.99, £1.2 million.
• Pence: amounts under a pound are usually written with p: 50p, 99p. Don’t combine the two; £0.50p is wrong.
• For US readers: many American publications add a dollar conversion in parentheses the first time an amount appears, based on the exchange rate at the time of writing.
• The code: GBP is the ISO currency code. Use it in tables, invoices and anywhere the symbol might not display.

The £ is a stylized capital L for libra, the Latin word for pound. The same root gives lb, the abbreviation for pounds of weight.

In the US, “pound sign” often means #, the key on a phone keypad. In the UK and most of the world, it means £. When you write for an international audience, call # the “number sign” or “hash” and keep “pound sign” for £.

Look-alikes:

• ₤ (lira sign) has two horizontal bars. Unicode added it for the Italian lira, but even for the lira Unicode recommends £. For British pounds, always use £.
• ℔ (L B bar symbol) is the old abbreviation for pounds of weight, not money.
• # has nothing to do with British currency.

Other countries have pounds too, such as Egypt (EGP). If your text mentions more than one, use the codes.

There is no £ key on a US keyboard, but every system can type it. The Windows and Mac shortcuts are in the table above. Beyond those:

• iPhone: long-press the $ key on the numbers keyboard and slide to £.
• Android (Gboard): long-press $ on the symbols page.
• LaTeX: \pounds or \textsterling.
• Excel: choose the currency format with £ English (United Kingdom), so totals show the sign automatically and stay numbers you can calculate with.
• Data: store the code GBP next to each amount. The symbol alone is easy to lose in exports, and it can turn into a stray character when a file is opened with the wrong encoding.