Plural of dirham, the official currency used in several Middle Eastern and North African countries like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.
From Arabic dirham, derived from the Greek drachma, which was an ancient Greek coin. The word traveled through trade routes and became adopted as a monetary unit in Islamic regions.
The dirham's journey from ancient Greek coins to modern Middle Eastern currency shows how economics and language travel together—when Arabs adopted Greek coins for trade, they adapted the word too, which is why you can hear the ghost of 'drachma' inside 'dirham.'
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