ASCII Character £
Pound signThe pound sign £ is the symbol for the pound unit of sterling – the currency of the United Kingdom and previously of Great Britain and of the Kingdom of England. In the Unicode standard, the symbol £ is called pound sign, and the symbol ₤ is the lira sign. The encoding of the £ symbol in position xA3 (15610) was first standardised by ISO Latin-1 (an "extended ASCII") in 1985. Many early computers (limited to a 7-bit, 128-position character set) used a variant of ASCII with one of the less-frequently used characters replaced by the £. MSDOS on the IBM PC originally used a non-standard 8-bit character set Code page 437 in which the £ symbol was encoded as x9C; adoption of the ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1") standard code xA3 only came later with Microsoft Windows.