It's from the Greek drachma!! And from that we get dram for a unit of mass! Interesting that the Arabic adoption repairs the initial consonant cluster [dr] by inserting a vowel. Oh...sorry...I got carried away.
The other cool thing about the UAE dirham is that it's pegged to the US dollar. So, at least for the time being, and since 1997, 1 US dollar = 3.67 Dhs. A very handy thing for those of us who persist in thinking in our native currency, despite living in the UK for over three years.
I only have one complaint.
Why 3.67? Why not 3, or 4? See, unless something costs of 3.67 times some power of 10 (like a 367,000 Dhs villa), it's a royal pain to convert dirhams to dollars on the fly. (Of course it's also possible that I was absent on the day they covered the 3.67 times table in my third grade class). So my tactic is to divide x by 3 and by 4, and then choose a number in the middle of those two results. But it would be so much easier to just divide by either 3 or 4, particularly for those Barbie dolls that say "Math is hard" when you pull the string on their back.
No doubt my clever economist friend will shed some light on this one day, but in the meantime, I've got to get back to memorising my 3.67 times table.
Or, if you just can't be bothered, think of a 100 Dhs note as a $28 bill.
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