Text 1. The History of the Pound Sterling Symbol

The currency sign for the unit of money in the United Kingdom is the pound sterling symbol. It originally was a cursive capital L with two cross-bars which looked like this: ₤. Over time though this symbol got shortened to the more commonly used L, a cursive capital L with a single cross-bar. The pound symbol derives from the black letter "L", which is an abbreviation of the word Librae in Roman.

Libra was the basic Roman unit of weight, derived from the Latin word for scales or balance. From the beginning there was a connection between the weight of metal, usually silver, and the value of the currency.

The use of the ₤ as the pound sterling symbol dates back to about the 8th century, before there was a United Kingdom, before there was a Great Britain, before there was even an England. This was the ancient kingdom of Mercia.

The ₤ and later the L were common short hand symbols used in official and unofficial documents to stand for the British pound sterling.

Prior to 1971 the pound was divided into 20 shillings and each shilling into 12 pence, making 240 pence to the pound. The symbol for the shilling was from the Latin solidus – a small letter "s". The symbol for the penny was originally not “p” but "d", coming from the French word denier, which in turn was from the Latin denarius. Both the solidus and the denarius were ancient Roman coins.

The amount five shillings was written as "5s" or, more just, "5/-". The stroke, /, indicating shillings, the stroke meaning no pence. Sums of shillings and pence such as 3 shillings and 6 pence was written as either "3/6" or "3s 6d" and spoken aloud as "three and six". Higher amounts such as one pound five shillings would be symbolized using the pound sterling symbol as L1 5s.

In 1971 the United Kingdom converted the pound to a decimal system where the pound was subdivided into 100 units. They kept the name pence but did away with the term shilling. The symbol for the pence is now "p"; so an amount such as 50p (L0.50) is usually pronounced "fifty pee" rather than "fifty pence". This also helped to distinguish between new and old pence amounts during the changeover to the decimal system.

Price for an item could be 5 shillings 6 pence or 1 pound 10 shillings, for example. In the new system, those prices would be ₤0.45 and ₤1.5 respectively. Decimalisation made adding up prices much easier for people. It was hard for people to adjust but eventually most people loved the change.

If your keyboard doesn’t have a pound symbol and you need to get one into a document all you need to do is press Alt 0163 on the number pad that is usually found to the right of the letter keys, not the one above the letter keys, to get a pound sterling symbol into a document. On keyboards sold in the United Kingdom, the pound sterling symbol or ₤ symbol can be entered into a document by pressing shift and 3 on the top of the keyboard.

(the source: adapted from http://www.britishpoundsterling.co.uk/pound_sterling_symbol.html )

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