Saudi Riyal Sign

The Saudi riyal sign (⃁, U+20C1) is Saudi Arabia's official currency symbol, developed under a royal directive by a committee spanning the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Media, and the Saudi Standards organization. Its design draws on Arabic calligraphy, forming the Arabic letters of "ريال" (riyal) with the rāʾ (ر) letter's stroke doubling as a crossbar, in the same visual family as other crossbar-based currency symbols like the dollar and pound. King Salman officially approved the design on February 20, 2025, and SAMA submitted it for Unicode encoding shortly after (proposal L2/25-075, dated March 7, 2025). The Unicode Technical Committee approved it without changes at its 183rd meeting, April 22–24, 2025, and it shipped as a final, ratified character in Unicode 17.0 on September 9, 2025 — a full version ahead of the UAE dirham, Omani rial, and Maldivian rufiyaa signs, which are still in Unicode 18.0's beta as of this writing. Being final doesn't mean it's everywhere yet, though: an open GitHub issue on Inter, one of the most widely used open-source typefaces, requests the glyph be added — a sign that mainstream font coverage is still catching up even a full Unicode version after ratification. In the meantime, an open-source font (built specifically for this symbol) and community guides for using it in Word, Excel, and on the web already exist.