pound sign

One of many ways of referring to the symbol '#'. In my experience, this is the most common term refering to this symbol, although it has the disadvantage of also refering to £, the sign for the Britsh pound (the money, not the unit of weight).

# means 'number' ("#3") or, in editing, 'insert an extra space here'.

Other names for this symbol include:

Octothorpe

Delimeter

Cross-hatch

Gridlet

Double-cross

Tic-Tac-toe

And, perhaps most obscure of all, the Cross of Lorainne

£

It is the symbol for the unit of currency for the UK as well as a number of other nations, and is actually a stylised capital L with a line through it. You can generate this symbol in HTML using the code £

The symbol for the british pound. The most expensive currency in the world (currently) Roughly equivalent to $1.5 US. Used to be just currency but now with the UK's close links with Europe has turned into a political issue about national identity and independence, with many British people feeling that a single currency would rob them of economic independence in the future.

The pound sign (not, in Britain, to be confused with the hash symbol, #) is derived from the initial letter 'L' of words like livre and liber, which denote pound in French and Latin respectively. In this way, it is connected with the lb symbol for pound weight.

• ISO 8859 decimal: 163.
• ISO 8859 hex: A3.
• Unicode decimal: 163.
• Unicode hex: A3.
• Named HTML entity: £
• Numeric HTML entity: £ or £

This symbol is not only used to designate the Sterling Pound, but also the Irish Pound. In the case of Irish Pounds, the L symbol is often prefixed with the letters 'IR' to avoid confusion with Sterling. For example:

IR£29.99

The Irish Pound is also called the Punt, which is the name of the currency in the Irish language. The three-letter code for Irish Pounds is IEP. It's probably not worth memorising this fact, however, as the currency will cease to exist in 2002, when it is replaced by the euro.

The pound symbol itself may be rendered in HTML with either £ or latterly £