The pound sign is a Roman weight, a bank symbol, and a digital ghost

Countries & Cities · Published 29 September 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: The £ symbol is more than a currency marker. It traces back to Roman scales, evolved through centuries of English banking, and became a chaotic relic in the early days of computing. Depending on where you live, it might even be confused with the symbol for a number or a telephone key.

The £ symbol originates from the Latin letter L, representing libra pondo, the Roman Empire's basic unit of weight. This term, derived from the Latin word for a balance or scales, eventually became the English tower pound, defined as 350 grams of sterling silver. While the exact moment a horizontal line was first drawn through the L to indicate an abbreviation remains unknown, the symbol was in common use by the time the Bank of England was founded in 1694. A cheque from 1661 provides one of the earliest known examples of the sign.

For centuries, the visual representation of the pound was fluid. Until the 19th century, a simple letter L was often used in print. Between 1725 and 1971, the Bank of England used both one-bar and two-bar styles interchangeably. Since 1975, the Bank has exclusively used the single-bar version on its banknotes. In typography, these variations are considered allographs—style choices that do not change the underlying character. Regardless of how a font designer renders the bars, the Unicode standard assigns the symbol to the constant code point U+00A3.

The digital age introduced significant confusion. In American English, the term pound sign typically refers to the # symbol, often called the number sign elsewhere. This linguistic split caused technical headaches in the 20th century. Early computers with limited 7-bit character sets often replaced less-frequently used characters with the £, leading to a fragmented landscape where the symbol was encoded at different positions across various systems, from the BBC Micro to IBM mainframes. Today, the symbol remains a versatile, if occasionally misunderstood, icon of economic and cultural history.

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