The sign may be drawn with one or two bars depending on personal preference, but the Bank of England has used the one-bar style exclusively on banknotes since 1975.

The symbol derives from the upper case Latin letter L, representing libra pondo, the basic unit of weight in the Roman Empire, which in turn is derived from the Latin word libra, meaning scales or a balance.

[3]However, the simple letter L, in lower- or uppercase, was used to represent the pound in printed books and newspapers until well into the 19th century.

In international banking and foreign exchange operations, the symbol is rarely used: the ISO 4217 currency code (e.g., GBP, EGP, etc.)

In the eighteenth-century Caslon metal fonts, the pound sign was identical to an italic uppercase J, rotated 180 degrees.

Position xA3 was used by the Digital Equipment Corporation VT220 terminal, Mac OS Roman, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, and Acorn Archimedes.

Typewriters produced for the British market included a "£" sign from the earliest days, though its position varied widely.

But the advertisement notes that "We make special keyboards containing symbols, fractions, signs, etc., for the peculiar needs of Engineers, Builders, Architects, Chemists, Scientists, etc., or any staple trade."

On Latin-alphabet typewriters lacking a "£" symbol type element, a reasonable approximation could be made by overtyping an "f" over an "L".

[d] The symbol "£" is in the MacRoman character set and can be generated on most non-UK Mac OS keyboard layouts which do not have a dedicated key for it, typically through: On UK Apple Mac keyboards, this is reversed, with the "£" symbol on the number 3 key, typed using: Pressing and holding the local currency sign will invoke a pop-up box presenting an array of currency signs, from which the pound sign may be chosen.

The pound sign was used as an uppercase letter (the lowercase being ⟨ſ⟩, long s) to signify the sound [ʒ] in the early 1993–1995 version of the Turkmen Latin alphabet.