U+20A4 LIRA SIGN

U+20A4 was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Currency Symbols in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Currency Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as European Terminator and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 2 other glyphs. In text U+20A4 behaves as Prefix Numeric regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The pound sign (£ or ₤) is the symbol for the pound sterling—the currency of the United Kingdom (UK). The same symbol is (or was) used for similarly named currencies in some other countries and territories, such as the Irish pound, Gibraltar pound, Australian pound, and Italian lira.

The symbol derives from a capital "L", representing libra, the basic unit of weight in the Roman Empire, which in turn is derived from the Latin name of the same spelling for scales or a balance. The pound became an English unit of weight and was so named because it originally had the value of one tower pound (~350 grams) of fine (pure) silver.

The pound sign is placed before the number (e.g. "£12,000"), and separated from the following digits by no space or only a thin space.

The symbol ₤ was called the lira sign in Italy, before the adoption of the euro. It was used as an alternative to the more usual L to show prices in lire.

In American English, the term "pound sign" usually refers to the symbol # (see number sign), and the corresponding telephone key is called the "pound key". The symbols £ and # are both referred to as the pound sign in Canadian English (# is also referred to as the number sign).

In the original old Caslon metal fonts, the pound sign was identical to the italic capital "J" rotated 180 degrees.