Oman announced its rial sign in November 2025, and the Unicode Technical Committee gave it a permanent code nine weeks later. The code is settled. The fonts that have to draw it are not, and nobody has put a date on those.
The Unicode Technical Committee accepted U+20C4 OMANI RIAL SIGN on January 22, 2026. It publishes with Unicode 18.0 on September 16, 2026, the date a later meeting locked in. Unicode's own beta page puts it plainly: no further additions, no changes to code points, no changes to character names.
Oman moved quickly. The Central Bank of Oman announced the sign on November 19, 2025 and filed the Unicode proposal itself. Sixty-four days later the character had a number. The UAE dirham sign was accepted six months earlier, on July 22, 2025, and publishes in the same release.
| Milestone | When |
|---|---|
| Sign announced in Oman | November 19, 2025 |
| Accepted as U+20C4 | January 22, 2026 |
| Beta closed, character unchanged | July 7, 2026 |
| Unicode 18.0 publishes | September 16, 2026 |
| Fonts on phones and laptops | 2027 (our estimate) |
Putting a character into Unicode and putting it on a screen are different jobs. Seven things have to happen for the second one, and Unicode owns three of them. The rest belong to font foundries, operating system vendors and keyboard vendors, none of whom works to Oman's schedule.
| Stage | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Oman adopts a national symbol | Done, November 2025 |
| Proposal filed with Unicode | Done, L2/26-041 |
| Code point accepted | Done, U+20C4 |
| Published in the standard | September 16, 2026 |
| A font draws the glyph | One request open |
| Operating systems ship that font | Nothing announced |
| Keyboards offer a way to type it | Nothing announced |
The bottom three rows are why the sign is an empty box on nearly every device today.
Nothing can draw a character until a font contains it, so the font makers are the next people to move. On August 7, 2026 a request went up on the Noto fonts project to add the Saudi riyal, UAE dirham and Omani rial signs to Noto Sans Arabic and Noto Kufi Arabic. It is still open. Noto is Google's open font family and the one Android reaches for outside the Latin script, so that thread is a fair place to watch the bottleneck. It asks for the Saudi riyal sign as well, a year after that character entered the standard.
Apple, Google and Microsoft have said nothing about the Omani rial sign. Neither has any keyboard maker. Every date in the table below is ours, not theirs.
| Who has to move | Expected |
|---|---|
| Apps and sites with their own font | Live already |
| Arabic fonts that ship the glyph | During 2027 |
| iOS, macOS, Android, Windows | 2027 at the earliest |
| A key on your keyboard | No date yet |
Those come from the Saudi riyal sign, which is the closest precedent Oman has and a discouraging one. It has been in the standard since Unicode 17.0 published, and a year on most system fonts still do not draw it. Based on that, expect the Omani rial sign on mainstream phones and laptops during 2027, our estimate from the pattern rather than a platform announcement. Our Middle East currency symbols scorecard carries the full working and we update it the day a platform ships one.
No keyboard has a key for it and no operating system has a shortcut for it, so copying is the whole answer today. Our Omani rial sign page puts it one click away, and the paste carries U+20C4 with it. The text is correct the moment you paste it, even on a device that shows a box.
Two useful things follow. Storage, search and sorting already work: a system that saves the character saves the right character whether or not anything can draw it. And a website or an app can look right today by loading a font that includes the glyph, which is its owner's decision rather than something to wait for.
For anything that is not text, Oman published artwork instead. The Central Bank released the sign as SVG, PNG and EPS files with its own usage guidelines, so an invoice template, a price list or a shopfront sign can show the real shape now. Artwork is not a character, though. It cannot be searched, typed or pasted into a message.
For the currency signs your keyboard already draws, our currency symbols library has the dollar, euro, pound, yen and dozens more, each one click to copy. Our alt codes page covers typing a symbol that has no key of its own.
Oman is the third Gulf state with a currency sign of its own in Unicode. The Saudi riyal sign (U+20C1) arrived a full version earlier, in Unicode 17.0 on September 9, 2025, and the UAE dirham sign (U+20C3) lands on the same day as Oman's, which is a story of its own.
The Qatari riyal, the Kuwaiti dinar and the Bahraini dinar have no symbol at all. Nobody has designed one, so there is nothing for Unicode to encode, and all three are written as letters instead. Our scorecard sorts every regional currency into those groups and copies each one.
The Central Bank of Oman wrote the Unicode proposal itself, filed as document L2/26-041, asking that the character be encoded in Unicode and in ISO/IEC 10646 at the earliest opportunity. The same document lists what the bank had already published alongside the announcement: a usage guideline, and the sign as SVG, PNG and EPS artwork. Oman did the standards work for its own currency and shipped the drawings with it.
The sign is two Arabic letters crossed by two lines. ʿayn (ع) is the first letter of عماني, Omani. rāʾ (ر) is the first letter of ريال, rial. The shape names the country and the currency at once, which is exactly what ﷼ (U+FDFC), the generic sign Iran and Yemen share since 2002, cannot do.
Two terms turn up in coverage of this. A code point is the permanent number that identifies a character, and Oman's is U+20C4. Encoding means adding a character to the standard, which fixes its number and its name and says nothing about whether anything can draw it. U+20C4 is one of the 13,007 characters Unicode 18.0 adds. Our guide to how new Unicode symbols get approved walks the rest of the pipeline.
Fifteen regional currencies, which of them have a sign of their own, and where each one stands. Every row copies.
Open the Scorecard →Code point, character name and acceptance date come from the Unicode Consortium's own character pipeline and the UTC #186 minutes, consensus item 186-C24. The proposal is L2/26-041, filed by the Central Bank of Oman, and it links the bank's own Omani Rial Sign guidelines and design downloads. Release date and repertoire stability come from Unicode 18.0.0 and its beta page. The open font request is notofonts/arabic issue 291.