Fullwidth Pound Sign

It marks pounds in a fullwidth cell; the currency meaning stays £. The ordinary pound sign developed from L, the first letter of Latin libra, the Roman unit of weight. A cheque from January 1660 already shows a clearly recognizable £, and the sign was common by 1694. Those dates belong to the pound sign’s history; ￡ is its width-specific form.

In an East Asian character grid, ￡ can align with neighboring fullwidth characters. In regular Latin-script prose, it can look like a width-formatting mistake; it does not name a different currency.

Why is ￡ wider than £?

It is the zenkaku (fullwidth) compatibility form for East Asian layout. Japan’s JIS C 6226-1978 standard organized graphic-character interchange for Japanese text. Older Japanese encodings and conversion tables kept ordinary £ and fullwidth ￡ as distinct width forms; Unicode preserves the distinction for compatibility. In Japanese, this is the zenkaku pound sign.

Fullwidth describes its layout cell, not a promise of identical pixels across fonts. Compatibility normalization such as NFKC maps it to £, and older conversion paths may preserve or alter the width form. Use this form for fixed-cell layouts or legacy data that expects it; ordinary prose takes £.