Yes, for example in Chinese we group things in 10000s (萬) - the English term for 10 thousand is apparently "myriad" -

so 10 000 would be 1 myriad
100 000 would be 10 myriads
1 million is 100 myriads (e.g. "Who wants to be a millionaire" is translated as "100 myriad rich man")

You will notice this if you look at estate agent windows in HKG, as they will show the price of flats in English ($8M) and Chinese ($800萬).

The problem for westernized Chinese is that we are so used to grouping in thousands in English, that some people find it difficult to convert between the two systems and just translate numbers like 10 thousand literally. This sounds weird, just like it sounds weird to count in myriads in English, or even lakhs if you aren't Indian.


Just like a thousand thousand is a million in English, we have another word for myriad myriad, or 100 million: 億

The problem with some overzealous learners of English is that they hear of the word "billion" relatively early on and internalize it as equivalent to a 億. They then state ridiculous facts such as the population of China being 13 billion. Anecdotally, I have heard that a business deal fell through when the American party realized his projected turnover was out by one order of magnitude.

If I understand you correctly, that symbol is used for multiplication (as in dot product, but also in regular multiplications of numbers, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_dot ). Quite confusing.

That symbol is used to represent multiplication.
Both multiplicative signs are used in other ways.
Dot product, as you mentioned, although the dot in dot product is larger than the mid-dot.
The X is used for cross product.

I tend to use "*" for multiplication. But when using a dot for multiplication or a vector dot product, isn't it a "centered" dot, not a "lower" dot?

2*2 = 4

2·2 = 4

2.2= (2) + (2e-1)

a·b=(a)(b)cos(theta) (without all of the ugly vector notation...)

same with a cross-product centered x, though Arial doesn't seem to have one of those.

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I understand what you mean. But you misspoke. The dot product is a scalar product of two vectors. Vector product is a cross product.

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If you 1.351e3 would mean different things to europeans and americans. The confusion REMAINS.

No, this means exactly the same thing everywhere.

Wouldn't that just be 100 milliard?

They got up to Z$100T. Not sure if that was a US trillion, or a long-scale trillion.

Resetting the currency doesn't always require hyperinflation at that level; see for example the Mexican Peso (1:1000 reissue in 1993).

Sorry, I thought it was clear from context that I was talking about English use (whether long scale or modern short scale) -- the Lakh/Crore scale scale mentioned would clearly not apply here, nor would the chinese since mentioned. Nor would the largely-obsolete traditional scale sometimes used in English (dozen, score, gross, etc.)

"Avoids confusion" is the tricky part; any symbol is only meaningful insofar as it's read and understood.

Slightly, and in handwriting the difference is practically meaningless. My point is that a middle-dot would never work for distinguishing the integer/fractional parts of the number.

I don't understand why 1.351e3 would mean something different to Americans (and others) vs. Europeans (and others). The Americans understand what it is immediately, while the Europeans see from the utter lack of commas what the period means.
Again, that or 1.351·10^9 seems to be the typical convention, even among European scientists...

And if people are already bringing the asterisk into this discussion, in math/science it usually signifies the conjugate when it's above or more importantly convolution.

However, putting this whole sub-discussion of symbols aside, I think what's most important is to not use names like "billion", "milliard", etc. in an international setting, but rather write the number/exponent.

If I recall correctly, the same is true in Korean, which may have been borrowed from -- or influenced by -- Chinese.

10 = ship
100 = baek
1000 = chon
10000 = man
100000 = ship man
1000000 = baek man
10000000 = chon man

Memory is not as good as it used to be - and phonetics may be off.

Saw this thread in newsletter, read first page, became scared for future of humanity.

How about the Greek prefixes? They're standardized. A billion dollars might be 10^9 or 10^12, but a gigadollar or teradollar is unambiguous. :)

(I kid, somewhat.)

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Interesting! In Thai, 10 is "sip"

Stop using commas or points as dividers of integer numbers (i.e. one million = 1,000,000), use space instead (1 000 000) - in that way it doesn't matter whether you use decimal comma or decimal point - you know that that is the decimal separator.

Well spaces can be filled in later on. There is a justifiable reason for having names for large numbers. A billion, if you know which billion is being talked about, much easier to comprehend than 1000000000000.