What £ means
It marks an amount in pounds. The sign goes before the number, as in £25. A font may draw £ with one crossbar or two; the bars do not distinguish sterling from another currency.
Use £ on prices and invoices; “quid” is casual English for pounds.
On a North American phone keypad, “press pound” means #, not £.
Don't confuse it with
2Worth knowing
- £ is a stylised capital L for Latin libra, a Roman unit of weight; the crossbar marks it as an abbreviation. The same word gives lb for pounds of weight.
Questions people ask
1Why does £ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type £
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 00A3, then Alt+X to get £.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “pound sign”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 00a3, then Enter or Space.
HTML
£CSS
\00A3UK keyboard layout
Press Shift + 3. The active layout matters, not just the key's printed label.
Windows
Hold Alt and type 0163 on the numeric keypad.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
£
HTML hex
£
CSS content
content: "\00A3";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%C2%A3
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
2
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.