Qatar Emoji

🇶🇦 the Qatar flag emoji is maroon with a white band along the side nearest the pole, the two colours meeting in a serrated edge of nine white points. Like every country flag emoji it is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇶 and 🇦, for Qatar's country code QA, which phones and Macs join into the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters QA, while the person you send them to still sees the flag on their phone.

Qatar's own explanation of the flag: white for peace, maroon for the blood shed in the wars of the second half of the 19th century, and the nine points for Qatar as the ninth of the Gulf emirates that signed treaties with Britain. The usual story behind the colour is that the old red dye darkened to maroon in the desert sun. The flag is also unusually long: at 11 by 28 it is the only national flag more than twice as long as it is tall.

There is no maroon emoji, so where the flag doesn't show people write it in the nearest colours, 🤍🤎 or 🤍❤️, ⬜🟫 for a block of colour, white first the way the flag reads from the pole. The state emblem gives the rest of the first row: two crossed curved swords ⚔️ at the base, with a dhow ⛵ on three waves 🌊 beneath two palm trees 🌴.

Qatar flag vs Bahrain flag: 🇶🇦 or 🇧🇭?

The two flags are the most common mix-up in the Gulf, because both come from the same family of red-and-white flags. Qatar's 🇶🇦 is a dark maroon with nine points and is much longer; Bahrain's 🇧🇭 is bright red with five points. At emoji size the colour is the quickest tell, maroon for Qatar and red for Bahrain, and if your screen shows letters instead of flags, QA is Qatar and BH is Bahrain.

The neighbours each have their own collection: Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦, Qatar's only land border, Bahrain across the water, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.

Qatari riyal symbol: QR, QAR, ر.ق and ﷼

The Qatari riyal has no currency sign of its own in Unicode. Prices in Qatar are written QR in English (QR 15), QAR in banking and on exchange boards, and ر.ق in Arabic: ra and qaf, short for ريال قطري (Qatari riyal), with a full stop between them. To write it, copy ر and ق from the grid and put a full stop between them; Arabic runs right to left, so ر ends up on the right.

﷼ is the Unicode rial sign, a single character that spells the word riyal in Arabic script. It was encoded for Iran's rial, but currency tables and converters often show it for the Qatari and Saudi riyals as well, so it is in the grid for anyone who needs it; in Qatar itself you will mostly see QR. One riyal is 100 dirhams, and the riyal is pegged to the US dollar at 3.64 riyals per dollar, which is why 💵 and 💰 sit next to it.

Arabic letters and numbers for Qatar

Arabic is Qatar's official language. CLDR estimates about 2.3 million Arabic speakers there; the National Planning Council counted 3.37 million people in March 2026. Qataris speak Gulf Arabic at home but write Modern Standard Arabic in the Arabic script: 28 letters, written right to left; most join their neighbors, and their shapes change with position in a word. The grid groups the letters by shape: ب ت ث share one body and differ only in their dots, and so do ج ح خ, د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ and ع غ. Hamza ء is the catch in the throat between vowels, ة (ta marbuta) ends most feminine words, and ى (alif maqsura) ends words like على. Qatar itself is three letters, ق ط ر: paste them one after another and they join into قطر. Doha is الدوحة, with the article ال in front and ة at the end.

To type Arabic on Windows, add the Arabic keyboard under Settings › Time & language › Language & region and switch with Windows+Space; on a Mac add Arabic under System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources; on iPhone and Android add an Arabic keyboard and switch with the globe key. Arabic punctuation is turned to suit the script: the comma ، is upside down, the question mark ؟ is mirrored, and the semicolon is ؛. Eastern Arabic digits ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ are common on signs, number plates and banknotes, and even inside right-to-left text a number is written largest place first, left to right: ١٨ is 18.

For the full alphabet with its vowel marks see the Arabic collection. Most people living in Qatar came from abroad, so English is everywhere in shops and offices, and the country's large communities also write Persian, spoken by an estimated 280,000 people there, Malayalam and many other languages; Persian and Malayalam have collections of their own.

Qatar emoji for food, Doha and the desert

Machboos is the national dish: rice 🍚🍛 cooked with spices, dried black lime 🍋‍🟩 (loomi) and chicken 🍗, lamb or fish 🐟. Harees, wheat and meat cooked slowly into a smooth porridge, and thareed, a stew poured over thin bread 🫓, are the dishes of Ramadan and Eid 🍲. Luqaimat are crisp fried dough balls soaked in date syrup 🍯, and balaleet is sweet vermicelli with saffron and cardamom under a thin omelette 🥚, eaten for breakfast. Coffee ☕ means gahwa, light Arabic coffee with cardamom poured from a dallah into small cups and served with dates 🌴, and karak 🍵 is the strong, sweet tea boiled with milk 🥛 and cardamom that Qatar runs on, often with a chapati from the same roadside stall.

🕌 is the State Grand Mosque in Doha, and 🏛️ stands for the city's museums: the Museum of Islamic Art by I. M. Pei on its own island off the Corniche, and the National Museum of Qatar, built by Jean Nouvel in the shape of a desert rose crystal. 🏰 is Al Zubarah, the walled pearl-trading town and fort in the northwest, Qatar's UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2013. 🏙️🌃 is the West Bay skyline seen across the bay from the Corniche at night, 🛍️ Souq Waqif, the old market where you can also buy a falcon, and ✈️🧸 the arrival at Hamad International Airport, home of Qatar Airways and of the giant yellow Lamp Bear sculpture. Before oil and gas, Qatar lived from pearls 🦪; today its wealth comes from the North Field, one of the largest natural gas fields in the world, and the gas tankers 🚢 that carry it away.

South of Doha the sand dunes 🏜️ run down to Khor Al Adaid, the Inland Sea, where the Gulf reaches deep into the desert; people go dune bashing in 4×4s 🚙 and camp in the desert ⛺ in the cooler winter months. In summer the temperature regularly passes 40 °C, which is what ☀️🌡️🥵 is for. Off the coast, whale sharks 🦈 gather around the offshore Al Shaheen oil field every summer, and hawksbill turtles 🐢 nest on the beaches of the north.

Qatar National Day, World Cup and sport emoji

Qatar National Day is 18 December, the day Sheikh Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani succeeded his father in 1878 and began to unite the country. Doha turns maroon and white, men perform the ardha with swords ⚔️ and drums 🥁, fireworks 🎆 go up over the Corniche, and posts read 🇶🇦🤍🤎🎆 with اليوم الوطني (National Day). Independence from Britain itself came in September 1971.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup ⚽🏟️ was the first held in the Arab world and the first played in November and December; the final, Argentina beating France on penalties at Lusail Stadium, fell on National Day. Al Bayt Stadium is shaped like a Bedouin tent ⛺, and Stadium 974 was built from shipping containers and named after Qatar's phone code. The national team, nicknamed Al Annabi, "the maroons", won the AFC Asian Cup 🏆 in 2019 and again in the 2023 edition, played at home in early 2024.

Lusail also hosts night races under floodlights: MotoGP 🏍️ since 2004, and Formula 1 🏎️🏁, first raced there in 2021. High jumper Mutaz Essa Barshim won Olympic gold 🥇 in Tokyo, sharing it with Italy's Gianmarco Tamberi; Qatar hosts top tennis 🎾 in Doha, finished second at the 2015 World Men's Handball Championship 🤾 it hosted, and won beach volleyball bronze 🏐 in Tokyo. The second Tuesday of February is National Sport Day 🏃, a public holiday spent outdoors. At Al Shahaniya, camels 🐪 race ridden by small remote-controlled robot jockeys 🤖, with their owners driving alongside; falconry 🦅 and Arabian horses 🐎🏇 are the other old passions. In Ramadan 🌙, the middle of the month brings Garangao, when children in traditional clothes go from house to house singing and collecting nuts 🥜 and sweets 🍬; Eid greetings are عيد مبارك (Eid Mubarak) with 🌙🤲, 📿 is the misbaha prayer beads, and 🐑 belongs to Eid al-Adha.