The UAE Central Bank's new currency symbol, assigned U+20C3 and published in Unicode 18.0 on September 16, 2026, but still not typeable on any keyboard yet.
The dirham sign (, U+20C3) is the United Arab Emirates Central Bank's new currency symbol, unveiled in March 2025 alongside a companion digital-dirham mark. It was submitted to the Unicode Consortium for encoding, approved, and published in the Unicode 18.0 public beta on May 26, 2026, alongside the Omani rial and Maldivian rufiyaa signs. Unicode 18.0 published it as final on September 16, 2026, under the permanent name UAE DIRHAM SIGN. Publication alone doesn't put it on a keyboard, though: as of September 25, 2026, no operating system, system font, or input method ships native support, and the UAE Central Bank's own style guide recommendation (the number-6 key) is only a recommendation until device makers act on it. In the meantime, developers have already built real tooling around the confirmed codepoint: an open-source npm package, web font, and CSS/React/Vue/Angular/Svelte components (published as "dirham" on npm and GitHub) let you encode the correct character today via a temporary rendering layer, designed to be dropped the moment native OS support ships.
The final character itself: copyable today by codepoint, even though no system font renders it natively yet.
Need more than this one? Browse the full set in Currency Symbols →
The dirham isn't the only new currency symbol shipping in Unicode 18.0. Two more regional currencies got their own signs in the same release.
For contrast: currency symbols that cleared this same standard-to-keyboard gap years ago and are fully typeable today.
Saudi Arabia's riyal sign cleared this same path a full Unicode version sooner: final since Unicode 17.0, and typeable on Windows 11 since December 2025.
| Method | Input |
|---|---|
| Unicode | U+20C3 |
| Word (Windows) | 20C3 → Alt+X |
| HTML entity | ⃃ |
| CSS content | content: "\20C3" |
Unicode 18.0's publication on September 16, 2026, with this character as U+20C3 UAE DIRHAM SIGN, is confirmed by the Unicode Consortium's Unicode 18.0 announcement, and tbreak reported on September 23, 2026 that Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft still had to add support. The Saudi riyal sign's Windows 11 shortcut is in Microsoft's KB5070311 release notes.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter →Every world currency symbol you can already copy and paste today.
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Another Gulf currency symbol, published in the same Unicode 18.0 release.
A Gulf currency symbol that's already final, one Unicode version ahead.
The world's most recognized currency symbol, and its disputed origin.
The dated status tracker for this symbol's path through Unicode 18.0 and into real keyboards.
The full release this symbol shipped in: scripts, symbols, and new emoji.
The Maldives' own currency symbol, built from the Thaana letter ރ.