The UAE Central Bank's new currency symbol, assigned U+20C3 and frozen for publication in Unicode 18.0 — more locked-in than this release's draft emoji, 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 27, 2026, alongside the Omani rial and Maldivian rufiyaa signs. As of this writing it carries "white" status in Unicode's own pipeline documentation — meaning it's frozen for publication, pending only ISO approval, which is actually a more locked-in state than this same release's draft emoji candidates (several of which still carry pending name-change flags). Unicode 18.0 itself is now confirmed to publish as final on September 16, 2026. Publication alone doesn't put it on a keyboard, though — no operating system, font, or input method currently 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 confirmed character itself — copyable today by codepoint, even though no font renders it natively yet.
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 beta.
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 — already final since Unicode 17.0, not just in beta.
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.
Where every Middle East currency stands in Unicode today: five with their own sign, three sharing one, seven with none.
Another Gulf currency symbol shipping in the same Unicode 18.0 beta.
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 ships as part of — scripts, symbols, and draft emoji.
The Maldives' own currency symbol, built from the Thaana letter ރ.