Five currencies in the region have a Unicode sign that belongs to them alone. Three share a generic one. Seven have no symbol at all and are written as letters instead. Every row in the scorecard below is click to copy.
Unicode 18.0 gives the UAE dirham and the Omani rial a sign of their own on September 16, 2026. The Saudi riyal got one a year earlier. Add the Israeli new shekel and the Turkish lira, and five currencies in the region have a sign nobody else uses.
The other ten do not. Three borrow a generic sign that was never theirs, and seven are written as letters. The scorecard sorts all fifteen into those three groups, and every row copies.
| Currency | Copy it | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Israeli new shekel | U+20AA | Its own sign, since 1993 |
| Turkish lira | U+20BA | Its own sign, since 2012 |
| Saudi riyal | U+20C1 | Its own sign, since 2025 |
| UAE dirham | U+20C3 | Its own sign, from September 16, 2026 |
| Omani rial | U+20C4 | Its own sign, from September 16, 2026 |
| Iranian rial | U+FDFC | Shares one generic sign, since 2002 |
| Yemeni rial | U+FDFC | Shares the same sign as Iran |
| Egyptian pound | U+00A3 | Shares the British pound sign |
| Qatari riyal | QR | No sign, written as letters |
| Kuwaiti dinar | KD | No sign, written as letters |
| Bahraini dinar | BD | No sign, written as letters |
| Jordanian dinar | JD | No sign, written as letters |
| Iraqi dinar | IQD | No sign, written as letters |
| Lebanese pound | LL | No sign, written as letters |
| Syrian pound | LS | No sign, written as letters |
Click a cell in the middle column and it goes to your clipboard. The five rows with a sign of their own copy that sign. The three shared rows copy the sign they share. The seven rows with no sign copy the Arabic abbreviation people actually write, because that is what a Qatari riyal price looks like in practice.
Three of these signs show as an empty box on most devices today: the Saudi riyal, the UAE dirham and the Omani rial. The box is a missing font, not a broken character. The code travels with the paste, so the text is already correct and turns into the symbol the moment the device gets a font that draws it.
For the currency signs your keyboard draws today, our currency symbols library has the dollar, euro, pound, yen, rupee and dozens more. Our alt codes page covers typing a symbol that has no key of its own.
Most of these already draw on nearly any device. The shekel, the lira and the Egyptian pound have been in fonts for years, and the sign Iran and Yemen share since 2002.
Three do not: the Saudi riyal, the UAE dirham and the Omani rial. Expect those on mainstream phones and laptops during 2027, our estimate rather than a platform announcement. The next section shows the working.
The seven written as letters have nothing to wait for. Their abbreviations already work everywhere, and the buttons above copy them.
The Saudi riyal sign is the closest thing here to a controlled experiment. It has been in the standard since September 9, 2025, and it is a currency sign rather than an emoji, so it has to reach the system text fonts every app draws with. A year on, most of those fonts still do not have it.
| What we measured | Result |
|---|---|
| Saudi riyal sign into the standard | September 9, 2025 |
| Saudi riyal sign into system text fonts | Still missing on most devices |
| Unicode 17.0 emoji on Samsung Galaxy | 5.5 months |
| Unicode 17.0 emoji on iPhone, iPad, Mac | 6.5 months |
| Unicode 17.0 emoji on Windows | 11.5 months, still not stable |
| Unicode 17.0 emoji on Android (Pixel) | Over 12 months, unfinished |
The emoji numbers are the fast case. Emoji ride one dedicated font that every vendor updates on a schedule, while a currency sign needs every weight of the system text font. So the emoji gaps set the floor and the riyal sets the warning, and the answer sits between them.
Based on the Unicode 17.0 rollout and a year of watching the Saudi riyal sign, expect all three Gulf signs on mainstream phones and laptops during 2027, our estimate from that pattern rather than any platform announcement.
Until then the copy button above is the whole solution, and each sign has a page of its own: the Saudi riyal sign, the dirham sign, the Omani rial sign. We update this scorecard the day a platform ships one.
Unicode does not invent currency signs. A country's central bank designs one and formally adopts it, and only then can a proposal reach the Unicode Technical Committee with evidence of real use. That order never changes.
Of the ten currencies without a sign, exactly one has ever reached the committee. A 2017 proposal for a distinct Iranian toman sign was reviewed and sent back for evidence of real-world use. No resubmission has appeared in the nine years since.
The other nine have no adopted symbol to propose, and Unicode 19.0's repertoire is already being assembled. Expect this scorecard to read the same after the September 2027 release, our estimate from an empty pipeline rather than an announcement. What would change it is a central bank unveiling a sign: Saudi Arabia went from unveiling to the standard in about seven months, and the UAE took eighteen.
﷼ is named the Rial Sign, which makes it look like Iran's own. It is not. Unicode added it in 2002 as a generic sign, and Yemen uses the same one, so a price written with it does not say which country it came from.
Riyal and rial are one word transliterated two ways. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Yemen and Oman all use it for five different currencies. Two of those five now have a sign of their own, and the other three share or do without.
A codepoint is the permanent number that identifies a character, and a currency sign only gets one after a national decision. Israel and Türkiye made that decision nineteen years apart. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman all made it within about a year of each other, which is why three Gulf signs arrive almost together after more than a decade of nothing.
Unicode 18.0 publishes on September 16, 2026 and carries 13,007 new characters. The dirham and Omani rial signs went through its public beta on May 27, 2026 unchanged. Our guide to how new Unicode symbols get approved walks the whole pipeline, and our Unicode 18.0 release-date update covers the meeting that fixed the date.
Dollar, euro, pound, yen, rupee and dozens more, each one click to copy and drawn by every keyboard today.
Browse Currency Symbols →Currency sign and Unicode-version status cross-checked against each currency's own Wikipedia entry, the Unicode Blog's "From Central Bank to Code Point" roadmap, and the Unicode Consortium's own character pipeline documentation. The 2017 Iranian toman sign proposal and its outcome are documented in Unicode Technical Committee proposal L2/17-060 and the UTC 151 meeting minutes. Rollout figures come from our own Unicode 17.0 rollout tracker.