It's considered a faux pas to have purple hair after Groundhog Day.

This is Long-Lost Friends... Currency Edition.


If you've ever looked at lists of national currencies, you might have noticed that a number of Middle Eastern countries use the "rial" or "riyal".  Iran, Oman, and Yemen have a rial, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a riyal, and Morocco and Tunisia used to have a rial.  And if you're a crossword fan, you probably know that favorite Cambodian currency, the riel.

It makes sense that these might have a common ancestor, but what?

The answer is, amazingly, the Spanish real.  Originating in the 14th century, and translating to "royal," after the conquest of the New World and its voluminous silver mines, it became almost the standard currency of international trade.  It was even semi-standard in the US (the practice of breaking the coin into eight pieces for better change-making is why a quarter was called "two bits", one bit being the same as the Mexican peso), and in pre-Communist China (as the Mexican peso, called the "dollar Mex" by English-speakers there).

Apparently it was so respected that as the Middle East was decolonized in the mid-20th century, many of its governments adopted it as the new term for their currency.  And Cambodia started issuing the currency in 1952, before decolonization even, directly replacing the French Indochinese piastre, which itself had started as a replacement for the Mexican peso.

A distant legacy, I suppose, of the great trans-Eurasian oceanic trading network that was extant as far back as Roman times.