Libya Emoji & Symbols

🇱🇾 the Libyan flag is a red, black and green tricolour with a white crescent and star on the wide black band in the middle. It is the flag of the Kingdom of Libya, adopted at independence on 24 December 1951, and the usual reading ties its colours to the three historic regions: red for Fezzan, black for Cyrenaica, whose Senussi banner was a white crescent and star on black, and green for Tripolitania. In hearts it becomes ❤️🖤💚, and ☪️ or 🌙⭐ stand for the crescent and star.

Like every flag emoji, 🇱🇾 is not one picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇱 and 🇾, the country code LY, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC it shows as the letters LY; copy it anyway, the person on a phone sees the flag. On Discord you can type :flag_ly:. For Libya's neighbours see our Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Chad and Niger collections, and all the others in Flag Emoji.

The old Libya flag emoji: the green flag of 1977–2011

Many people search for the Libya flag emoji "before 2011" or "2010". The flag they mean was a plain green field with nothing on it, flown from 1977 to 2011 under Muammar Gaddafi; apart from Afghanistan's plain white flag in 1996–1997, it was the only national flag of its time made of a single colour. Before it came a red, white and black tricolour from 1969 and, from 1972, the same tricolour with a golden hawk, the flag of the Federation of Arab Republics shared with Egypt and Syria.

There is no emoji for the green flag, and there never was one on phones: emoji for every country's flag only arrived in the 2010s, after the National Transitional Council brought back the 1951 flag in 2011, so 🇱🇾 has always drawn the tricolour. People who want the old flag paste 🟩, the green square, or 💚. The 1951 flag was the one carried by the protesters from February 2011, which is why it is often called the flag of independence.

Ramadan, Eid and national day emoji in Libya

In Ramadan the fast is broken at sunset with a date 🌴 and a glass of milk 🥛, then sharba libiya, the Libyan soup of lamb, tomato and small pasta seasoned with mint, 🍲. People wish each other Ramadan Kareem 🌙🕌; 🤲 is a prayer of supplication, 📿 prayer beads, 🕋 the Kaaba for the Hajj.

At Eid al-Fitr families visit each other with trays of sweets such as maqrouth, semolina filled with dates, and ghriba shortbread, so 🍪🫖 sit well next to 🌙🎉 and Eid Mubarak. At Eid al-Adha a sheep is sacrificed, hence 🐏. 🪬, the hand-shaped khamsa charm, is a familiar sign of protection across North Africa.

24 December is Independence Day, the anniversary of independence in 1951, when Libya became the first country to gain independence through the United Nations. 17 February marks the start of the 2011 revolution in Benghazi, and its anniversary brings out flags, 🎆 fireworks and 🇱🇾❤️🖤💚 everywhere.

Libyan food emoji: bazeen, couscous, mbakbaka and tea

There is no emoji for bazeen, the dish people most connect with Libya: a dome of barley dough set in the middle of a pot of spicy tomato stew with lamb, potatoes and boiled eggs, eaten together by hand from one dish. 🍲 or 🥘 stand in for it, and for kuskas (couscous) and the other stews of the Libyan table. Pasta has been everyday food since the Italian period: 🍝 is mbakbaka, pasta cooked right in a spicy sauce of tomato 🍅 and pepper 🌶️, and macaroni with lamb. 🐟 is the fish of the coast, often cooked in a hot red sauce, and 🫓 the flatbreads baked in clay ovens.

🌴 is for dates, eaten all year and above all in Ramadan, 🫒 for olives and olive oil, and 🍯 for asida, a smooth wheat pudding served with date syrup and butter, made when a baby is born and on the Prophet's birthday. Libyan tea 🫖🍵 is strong, sweet and poured from high up to raise a thick foam, often with roasted peanuts or almonds 🥜 dropped into the glass. In the cafés of Tripoli and Benghazi the order is an espresso or a macchiato ☕, another Italian legacy.

Libya in places: Sahara, coast, Roman cities and Ghadames

Most of Libya is Sahara 🏜️🐪☀️: sand seas, rocky plateaus and oases with palm groves, home of the fennec fox 🦊 and, in the southwest around Ghat, of Tuareg communities and the rock art of the Tadrart Acacus. Almost everyone lives along the Mediterranean 🏖️🌊, whose Libyan coast is about 1,770 kilometres long, and in the hills behind it, the Nafusa Mountains in the west and the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, in the east ⛰️.

🏛️ is for the ancient cities, three of them on UNESCO's list: Roman Leptis Magna, birthplace of the emperor Septimius Severus, Sabratha with its theatre by the sea, and Greek Cyrene in the east. 🏰 is the Red Castle, the Assaraya al-Hamra, on the waterfront of Tripoli, and 🏘️ the old town of Ghadames, the "pearl of the desert", with its whitewashed mud-brick houses and covered alleys. 🛢️ stands for oil, which made the country rich from the 1960s, and 💧 for the Great Man-Made River, which pipes ancient groundwater from under the desert to the coastal cities.

Libyan symbols: Omar Mukhtar, ⵣ, football and the Arabic letters

🦁 stands for Omar Mukhtar, the "Lion of the Desert", the teacher of the Quran who led the resistance to Italian rule in Cyrenaica for some twenty years until he was captured and hanged in 1931. He is Libya's national hero, and the 1981 film about him, Lion of the Desert, is still shown on television. ⵣ, the Tifinagh letter yaz, is the emblem of the Amazigh (Berber) people, who live in the Nafusa Mountains, in Zuwara and, as Tuareg, in the south; the Amazigh flag has no emoji, so ⵣ is what people paste.

⚽ is the national passion. Libya hosted the Africa Cup of Nations in 1982 and reached the final, lost to Ghana on penalties in Tripoli, and won the African Nations Championship 🏆 in 2014; the Tripoli derby between Al-Ahli and Al-Ittihad fills the stadium 🏟️. For music, 🪘🎶 covers the darbuka drums of weddings and malouf, the Andalusian music of Tripoli.

The national language is Arabic, written right to left in 28 letters, all in the grid above with the hamza forms and the Arabic comma ، semicolon ؛ and question mark ؟; see our Arabic collection for how to type them. Libya itself is written ليبيا. The dinar, divided into 1,000 dirhams, has no Unicode sign: write LD or LYD (the currency code) in Latin script and ل.د in Arabic.