Has this symbol ever been used for a currency unrelated to Pounds Sterling (obviously ignoring those derived from Sterling, such as the Irish pound)? And, indeed, has it ever had any other non-currency function?
Dunno. What I do know is that it’s just an old-fashioned “L” with a coupla lines across it to show that it’s used as a symbol. According to AskOxford.com, “The L stands for the Latin word libra, the name of a Roman unit of weight, which also gave rise to the abbreviation lb for a pound as a measure of weight, and to the French word livre.”
Apparently some people call # a pound sign too. But anyway I figure AskOxford would’ve mentioned it if £ had been used for another currency.
The same sign was used for the Italian lira until it was replaced by the euro.
Also used in Malta and Cyprus where there own pound is the unit of currency.
I believe, though I have no cite, that it was used throughout Europe, the near east and north africa (the limits of the Roman empire) between the collapse of siad empire and the rise of national currencies.
An identical stylized “L” used to appear on the labels of records made by Parlophone, a German company acquired by EMI Group Plc in 1927. (Parlophone famously signed up the Beatles in 1962.) The Parlophone logo had two horizontal crossbars on the vertical stem of the “L,” rather than the single one in the pound sign on my computer keyboard, but the pound sign can be written with one or two crossbars, according to AskOxford.com.
ISTR reading in a book about the Beatles that Parlophone had itself bought another record company called Lindstrom which used the stylized “L” as its logo, and Parlophone decided to keep using it. I also STR from that Beatles book that the logo was widely assumed to be a pound sign, though that’s not the case.
I had a quick glance at Parlophone’s website to see if it confirms this. The website is being revamped and so isn’t available at the moment, but it does display the stylized “L” symbol.
ColonelDax, business and financial history geek
I’ve seen it used in some ancient computer code, we’re talking 1940’s or early 50’s. I don’t know if it symbolised something or was just another character.
It’s a bit odd that £ isn’t used for some computing function because all the other symbol keys are `!"$%%^&*()_+ and -={}:@~;’#<>?,./|. I’m not sure about ‘¬’. Poor old £ is left out.
BTW how do you type the Euro symbol on the ‘4/$’ key?
What I do is hold down the Alt Gr key at the same time as the 4 $ key.
The " Alt Gr " key is the one immediately to the right of your space bar if it isn’t so marked.
A slight hi-jack the Portuguese Escudo used the $ sign before the change-over to the Euro. I don’t know how that came about.
The Alt Gr thing doesn’t work for me, it does stuff for then ` 1 2 3 keys - formatting on 1 2 and 3 but nothing on 4. Oh well we’re not gonna join the Eurozone for a while yet, I’ll get by ::sighs::
I think you can download a patch or small program to enable this function. I shall try and do some digging around and get back to you.
I have had a good look around and cannot find that program . I am sure that a few years ago , with my old computer , I downloaded such a program to enable the € sing on my keyboard. Can anyone else help ?
Before the Euro came into existence (hence before I got a keyboard with an € key), I had to download a programm, indeed. That was years ago, but I’m pretty certain I found it on the Microsoft site.
That’s because it wasn’t included in the standard ASCII character set, only in the extended one.
Hey, so now we all know. Thanks.
And everyone else, no sweat guys I really don’t need a Euro key I just wondered.
It’s also used in some branches of mathematics to represent a Lie derivative. Actually, I think that might properly be without the crossbar, but I’ve seen it both ways. This may just be due to the fact that the version with the crossbar is more readily available on computers.
So am Ii correct in my longstanding assumption that the “£” and “lb” as an abbreviation for pound measure share the same origin?
At least in the US, the # is called a pound sign because it can be used to denote weight measured in pounds.
As for trying to use the euro symbol, Euro patch seems to have pretty good info, including a link to the Microsoft patch page, and the info that the ASCII code is 128.
So <alt>0128 gives you €.