Pound Sign

Pound Sign is part of the Latin-1 Supplement block, primarily used for Western European languages (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and others) that need accented letters or region-specific punctuation beyond plain ASCII.

Unicode block: Latin-1 Supplement (U+0080–U+00FF). This block extends ASCII with accented Latin letters, currency signs, and legal symbols. It maps directly onto ISO 8859-1 ("Latin-1"), the dominant Western-European text encoding of the 1990s, which is why Windows Alt codes for this range still work today.

At Unicode code point U+00A3 (decimal 163), Pound Sign is the 3rd of 95 characters cataloged in this category on How To Type Any Symbol. In terms of typing methods, it is one of the characters in this block with both a documented Windows Alt code and a Mac keyboard shortcut, making it typeable without copy-paste on either platform. Regardless of platform, clicking the copy button above places the exact character on your clipboard, ready to paste into any application that accepts Unicode text.

💡 Good to know: Word processors often auto-correct a plain letter into its accented form when you type the base language's autocorrect rules — check your language settings if it appears unexpectedly.