1 Ouguiya with 'واحدة'

Mauritania's ouguiya system was introduced in 1973 when the country withdrew from the West African CFA franc zone, one of relatively few African nations to abandon the colonial-era currency framework entirely. The 1 ouguiya denomination presented an immediate linguistic challenge: Arabic has grammatically distinct forms for "one" of something, and the inscription واحدة — the feminine singular — was chosen to agree with the grammatical gender of the word ouguiya itself. This was not a trivial editorial decision; it signaled a deliberate alignment with classical Arabic grammatical convention rather than colloquial usage.

The type ran unchanged for three decades before the 2004 redenomination effectively retired it.