Unicode 18.0 gives the UAE dirham and Omani rial their own currency symbols, following the Saudi riyal a version earlier. That's 5 Middle East currencies with a dedicated Unicode sign now in hand — and at least 10 more still sharing a generic symbol or using none at all.
Unicode 18.0's beta, published May 27, 2026, gives the UAE dirham and Omani rial their own dedicated currency symbols — following the same path the Saudi riyal cleared a full Unicode version earlier, finalized in September 2025. Stack those three next to the region's older entries — the Israeli new shekel (1993) and Turkish lira (2012) — and five Middle East currencies now have, or will shortly have, a currency symbol that's exclusively theirs.
That's real progress, but it's a minority. Look at the rest of the region and the picture splits into two very different categories: currencies that share someone else's generic symbol, and currencies with no dedicated symbol proposal on record at all.
Three tiers, based on what each currency actually has today — not what it's called informally.
| Currency | Symbol | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Israeli new shekel | ₪ U+20AA | ✅ Own symbol — Unicode 1.1 (1993) |
| Turkish lira | ₺ U+20BA | ✅ Own symbol — Unicode 6.2 (2012) |
| Saudi riyal | U+20C1 | ✅ Own symbol — final, Unicode 17.0 (2025) |
| UAE dirham | U+20C3 | ✅ Own symbol — Unicode 18.0 beta (2026) |
| Omani rial | U+20C4 | ✅ Own symbol — Unicode 18.0 beta (2026) |
| Iranian rial | ﷼ U+FDFC (shared) | ⚠️ Generic symbol only, since 2002 |
| Yemeni rial | ﷼ U+FDFC (shared) | ⚠️ Same generic symbol as Iran |
| Egyptian pound | £ (shared) | ⚠️ Generic pound sign, not exclusive |
| Qatari riyal | — (text: QR / ر.ق) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
| Kuwaiti dinar | — (text: KD / د.ك) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
| Bahraini dinar | — (text: BD / .د.ب) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
| Jordanian dinar | — (text: JD / د.أ) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
| Iraqi dinar | — (text: IQD / د.ع) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
| Lebanese pound | — (text: LL / ل.ل) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
| Syrian pound | — (text: LS / ل.س) | ❌ No dedicated symbol |
"No dedicated symbol" reflects no evidence found of a currency-specific Unicode codepoint or an active encoding proposal as of this writing — not proof one has never been filed. A country's central bank has to design and formally adopt a symbol before Unicode can encode it; several currencies here may simply not have reached that step yet.
Each row in that table is really its own story with its own timeline — we track them individually: the dirham sign and its dated status update, the Omani rial sign, and the Saudi riyal sign — already final, but still waiting on mainstream font support a full Unicode version later. Same standard, three different clocks.
For the currencies you can already type without any of this waiting, see our currency symbols library. For the ones you can't — including everything in this scorecard's bottom two tiers — alt codes covers the copy-paste workaround.
Of the currencies without their own symbol, only one has a documented Unicode submission on record: a 2017 proposal for a distinct Iranian "Toman" sign, which the Unicode Technical Committee reviewed and sent back, asking for evidence of real-world usage before it would reconsider. No resubmission has surfaced since. None of the other seven "no symbol" currencies in this scorecard have a known active proposal — which likely means no central bank has designed and formally adopted a candidate symbol yet, the step that has to happen before Unicode can act. We'll update this scorecard as that changes, the same way we're already tracking the dirham, Omani rial, and Saudi riyal individually.
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Browse Currency Symbols →Currency symbol 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.