The British pound is also known as the pound sterling, the U.K. pound, the English pound, the British pound sterling and sterlings. The official abbreviation used on the foreign exchange market is GBP, and the symbol representing the currency is written as £.
The U.S. dollar is also referred to as the American dollar. The currency is officially abbreviated as USD and the symbol used is $.
Apart from being used extensively on the internet, both the British pound and the U.S. dollar are used as official currencies for many countries. Pound sterling is used as the official currency for the Channel Islands, Isle of Man and the United Kingdom.
The U.S. dollar is used as the official currency in American Samoa, the British Virgin Islands, Guam, the Marshall Islands, El Salvador, Northern Mariana Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Turks and Caicos Islands, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Timor-Leste, Midway Islands, Johnston Islands, Wake Island and the United States.
Several charts are available online to keep you up to date with the latest movements in the British and American currencies. The BBC's website offers a summary of the position of the pound sterling in comparison to the dollar through several charts. Users can choose to view a 12-month, three-month, one-month or daily chart which will indicate all fluctuations in the exchange rate between the two currencies.
On the Forex Directory website, tick-by-tick movements of the two currencies are indicated to keep traders and investors up to date with the latest changes throughout the day. The Reuters website features a chart with an overview comparing fluctuations in the euro, British pound and dollar, as well as a currency table.
Currency conversion is made easy with online currency conversion calculators. You no longer have to look up the latest exchange rates between the British pound and U.S. dollar to be able to do currency conversion, but only need to select the two currencies and the amount you wish to convert. These calculators are updated daily, and can be found on websites such as CoinMill, Reuters and Exchangerate.
You might want to figure out what an item you bought years ago in Great Britain would have cost in U.S. dollars today. Currency conversion like this could be very tricky, as many factors come to play. You have to consider the inflation in the two countries in certain years when making the calculations. Measuring Worth offers an online conversion calculator that can do this calculation for you (see the Resources section). The site obtains annual observation price series from government agencies to update the calculator.
