Memorize World Currencies: 149 Flashcards from the Dollar to the CFA Franc

Deck GD8846 — "Country Currencies" pairs 149 countries with their currency and ISO code, from the US Dollar (USD) to the Swazi Lilangeni (SZL). It is a clean, one-fact-per-card list, which makes it fast to drill — but 149 isolated pairs are hard to hold unless you give them structure. Here is how.

Sample cards from the deck

What the deck covers

Majors (yen, pound sterling, franc, renminbi, rupee, ruble, real, won), the Nordic krona/krone split (SEK, NOK, DKK, ISK), the Gulf dinars and riyals (KWD, BHD, OMR, QAR, SAR, AED), Central Asia (tenge, som, afghani), Latin America (sol, bolívar, guaraní, boliviano, colón, córdoba, lempira, quetzal, balboa), Africa (naira, cedi, birr, kwanza, metical, kwacha, pula, ariary, nakfa, ouguiya, dalasi, dobra, loti, lilangeni) and the Pacific and Southeast Asia (kina, tālā, riel, kip, kyat, rufiyaa, pataca).

Learn the families, not 149 pairs

Sort the backs into name families first: dinar (Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Serbia), rupee (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mauritius, Seychelles), peso, franc, shilling (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia) and kwacha (Zambia, Malawi). Then the only thing left to memorise is the odd ones out.

Two clusters deserve their own session:

• The CFA zone (cards 126-139): Central African XAF for Congo, CAR, Chad, Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea; West African XOF for the eight UEMOA states. Guinea (GNF) and Mauritania (MRU) sit right next to them on the map but are not in the zone — the classic trap.
• Dollarised countries: Ecuador, El Salvador, East Timor and Panama all answer "US Dollar". Shuffle them together so you stop guessing "peso".

Read the ISO code as a hint

The first two letters of an ISO 4217 code are the country code, the third is usually the currency's initial: JP+Y, BR+L, ZA+R (Zuid-Afrika). That makes CHF (Confoederatio Helvetica) and the X-codes (XAF, XOF = supranational) easy to spot. Put the code on the front of a second pass: "KZT → ?" trains recognition the way you will see it on an exchange board.

Cards to update

A currency list goes stale. Fix these as you study:

• Card 2 says "19 EU countries" while card 80 says Croatia adopted the euro in 2023 — that made 20, and Bulgaria joined on 1 January 2026, so the eurozone now has 21 members. Card 79 (Bulgarian Lev, BGN) should read Euro (EUR).
• Card 70: Zimbabwe replaced ZWL with the Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG, code ZWG) in April 2024.
• Card 141: Sierra Leone redenominated in 2022; the new leone is SLE.
• Missing countries worth adding: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Eastern Caribbean dollar states (XCD), Guyana, Suriname, South Sudan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Find GD8846 in the library at flip-it.app. Same category: pair it with the official language of every country for a second fact per country.