U+00A3 "£" Pound Sign Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
£
U+00A3 "£" Pound Sign is a symbol representing the pound sterling, the official currency of the United Kingdom and its territories, as well as several other currencies such as the Egyptian and Lebanese pounds. Its design is derived from the capital letter "L" with a single or double horizontal crossbar, which itself originated from the Latin word "libra," meaning a unit of weight or balance. The symbol has been in continuous use for centuries, appearing on banknotes, coins, and financial documents, and it is encoded at position U+00A3 in the Unicode standard to ensure consistent representation across digital platforms and fonts.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00A3 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Pound Sign |
| Block | Latin-1 Supplement |
| General Category | Currency Symbol |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | European Terminator |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | £ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | £ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC2 0xA3 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00A3 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000A3 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00a3 |