The Dubai font inspired us to look at the currency symbol for the United Arab Emirates – the Dirham. A quick guide for those of us who don’t know any Arabic!
There’s no direct symbol for the Dirham – unlike the dollar, Euro or Yen/Yuan.
The usual prefix is DH or Dhs , just plain old western letters and it looks like this:
That’s usually the way Dirham prices are shown.
The official currency code is AED.
Arabic
In Arabic, there’s a three character prefix (shown here as an image and text)
د.إ
It’s made up of three Arabic characters. Here’s the Unicode references and names.
0625 Arabic Letter Alef with Hamza below
002E Fullstop / Period (same as western alphabets)
062F Arabic Letter Dal
Any font with Arabic character support will work. Microsoft Office has quite a few fonts with Arabic letters included.
Just like any other extended range character not on your keyboard, you can use the Office Insert | Symbol feature:
Or the shortcut: type in the Unicode reference (eg 0625 ) then Alt + X.
Fils
One Dirham is made up of 100 fils (equivalent of cents).
The Arabic word for fils is also three characters (again, image and characters):
فلس
0633 Arabic Letter Seen
0644 Arabic Letter Lam
0641 Arabic Letter Feh
Usually you’d not bother with the word fils, instead use a decimal point eg 0.25 for 25 fils.
