The Word “Million” Didn’t Exist Until We Needed It | Hacker News Reader

The Word “Million” Didn’t Exist Until We Needed It

nautil.us

24 pointsdnetesn38 comments

My first language is Tamil which is spoken in South India. Tamil is known to be a very ancient language.

The interesting fact is that Tamil has had distinct names for wide range of numbers[1] ranging from 10^21 to fractions as small as 1/2,323,824,530,227,200,000,000

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_numerals#Sanskrit-System

There are people who debate that Tamil is as old/older than Sanskrit. But there is no proof for that claim. But there is more than conclusive proof that these distinct names for these large and small numbers existed in written texts since very long time.

Edit: Grammar, fixed link

On a similar note, English outside the United States used the long-scale billion (10^12, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales) until the last few decades.

When numbers on the order of 10^9 started to become a thing that needed to be discussed regularly, everybody grudgingly switched to the American short-scale "billion" on the grounds of it actually being useful.

How is it more useful though? It's just different words for the same numbers, and it seems to me like long scale would actually be more useful because it allows representing larger numbers.

You can represent any number in either scale, the short scale simply aligns the names with the comma/dot representation. The short scale offers more precision and is easier to say when dealing with common "large" numbers like GDP, or shipping volume or whatnot. Instead of saying "the trade imbalance this quarter was $58 billion" you'd say "the trade imbalance this quarter was $58 thousand million". Or "The total revenue this quarter was $23 billion, 118 million, 326 thousand, 112" or "$23 thousand million, 118 million, 326 thousand, 112".

The later is harder to say, maps poorly between representational spacers (commas/dots depending), and is easy to confuse.

Keep in mind, before the 20th century, there wasn't much of a case where anybody would have to deal with figures this large, these days literally everybody does. Getting rid of two syllables and aligning the spoken form with the representational form greatly simplifies day-to-day speech.

That's why the long scale has milliard, billiard, trilliard, etc.

The long scale is slightly more logical with its

  (Latin number)illion = 10^(6 times Latin number)
  (whatever)illiard = 1000 times (whatever)illion

, compared to the short scale's

  (Latin number)illion = 10^(3 times Latin number plus 3)

that somehow maps even Latin numbers to odd exponents and vice versa.

If one could design this from a clean sheet, I think a short form where billion = 10^6, trillion = 10^9 would make the most sense, as it logically names numbers that one might encounter. Scientists who need huge numbers will use scientific notation or phrases such as gigadollars.

As the sibling comment says, I think you somehow missed the -iard words.

Since the words larger than thousand that are used most often (at this time) are million and milliard/billion, I like the way milliard is very different from million and at the same time, in French, follows a kind of natural progression from mille, million, milliard.

Because the newspaper regularly needs to discuss numbers on the order of billions, and it's nice to save a couple of syllables over "thousand million" every time. The newspaper only occasionally discusses 10^12s (mostly in the context of how much debt the US is in, go figure) and "trillion" is fine for that. (The long scale trillion is 10^18, a useless sort of number.)

Larger numbers rarely need to be discussed outside contexts where you'd use scientific notation anyway.

I find this odd. Ancient Egyptian had a character for a million - someone sitting/kneeling with one leg (like they just dropped to the ground) and throwing their hands up in the air, (seeming to me) very very impressed, like "whoa!"

Here it is -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_numerals

maybe I'm reading too much into it. But anyway a million doesn't seem that large of a number - if the ancient egyptians had it, why shouldn't societies thousands of years later? So it's a bit odd...

The article explicitly mentions Egyptian. I think this story highlights the recurring theme of medieval culture rediscovering ancient knowledge.

New words can have significant impacts on how we perceive the world, down to not even noticing certain things unless we have a word for them (Radiolab did an episode on this called 'Words' - the idea of the green/blue distinction not being represented in other languages is another common issue).

Even in the tech world, I see how having a word to hang myriad ideas off of can have a big impact. 'Logical' types howl and whine at things like 'cloud', 'Ajax', or 'HTML5' meaning things they don't technically mean, but nonetheless each brought numerous things together and in some cases (such as 'cloud') formed the cornerstone of a new sector. (See also the recent use of the word 'unicorn' around here.)

On my first visit to India I was confused to find that big numbers were expressed in 'lakh', which is 100,000. So a million could be "ten lakh".

This unit would be useful for discussing house prices where I live, but doesn't seem to have caught on.

Lakh is controversial on Stack Exchange. A bunch of people use it, and few other people want to crush anything that's not US English and edit it out.

Other than India, is Lakh used in any other English speaking countries or dialects?

NRIs have spread it around, I hear it all of the time here in the GCC but usually only from Pakistanis or Indians. Most people are familiar with it and understand it though.

NRI: Non-resident Indian

GCC: (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council (Countries)

Had to look them up just like many people have to look up lakh after seeing it on Stack Overflow.

I have no idea.

It's used a lot in India, and on any site that has many users from India, so my attitude is "suck it up cultural fascists". There's a bunch of loan words in English from India, and a few more aren't going to hurt.

(Edit: this sounds a bit grumpy, it's not meant to be.)

Well, I mean, sometimes word usage only goes one way. Not using it in place of something more widely understood just means that whatever is written will be more comprehensible to a wider audience. As an American I resist using highly localized idioms and slang (when I'm aware they're localized), I'm pretty sure Brits and Aussies, etc. do as well.

I've also only ever seen it in Indian sourced English language news -- and I have to look up what quantity it refers to every single time because it simply doesn't exist in any other English language using population I'm aware of.

Sure, they're mildly confusing. But you don't go around changing the words that other people use, and I doubt you say "US English only", and I hope you accept that (eg) baseball references are baffling to many people (who have little exposure to this niche sport played by a small number of people).

One of the things missed by the "US / UK english only" crowd is that there are a bunch of subtle differences that have nearly opposite meanings.

Tabling something means either put it forward for discussion, or remove it from discussion. A moot point is something that's open for discussion, or something where discussion is pointless.

At least when someone uses lakh or crore I know I don't know what they mean and look it up. (and look it up is highlight + right click and select "search").

Most U.S. English speakers should be able to tolerate dialectal variants on some words and meanings, and maybe even have a passing familiarity with some idioms and slang. I generally think sports metaphors should be out in international forums, and I'm not even sure they should generally be assumed in local forums either (I don't even have a passing interest in most sportsballs and sometimes have trouble following references even to U.S. local sports).

Good points on the opposite meaning idioms.

Perhaps the most right way to deal with things is to just use the number, or use scientific notation?

I assume you use "football" for only its proper meaning.

Similarly Japanese makes extensive use of "man" (万) for 10,000

There is no actual "word" for million in Chinese.

百 is a hundred, 萬 is ten-thousand. A million is 百萬. But also I'm guessing 400萬 could be understood as the same as 4百萬/四百萬.

> There is no actual "word" for million in Chinese.

> 百 is a hundred, 萬 is ten-thousand. A million is 百萬. But also I'm guessing 400萬 could be understood as the same as 4百萬/四百萬.

But there is 億 in Chinese which means a hundred million.

    　十       　             10 ten
    　百      　             100 hundred
    　千      　           1,000 thousand
    　萬      　          10,000 ten-thousand
    十萬     　          100,000 hundred-thousand
    百萬     　        1,000,000 million
    千萬     　       10,000,000 ten-million
    　億     　      100,000,000 hundred-million
    十億    　     1,000,000,000 billion
    百億    　    10,000,000,000 ten-billion
    千億    　   100,000,000,000 hundred-billion
    萬億 or 兆 1,000,000,000,000 trillion

萬 and 億 are traditional Chinese characters. The simplified characters are 万 and 亿 respectively.

兆 is usually avoided because it does not only mean trillion but also 百萬 (million) in mainland China's translation of "mega-byte" or "mega-pixel" for example.

Interesting that 兆 is sometimes used in Hanzi for a trillion. Core meanings 兆 include 'portent' or 'omen' which could cause a central banker to lament 'maybe we've printed too much currency'. English used to have a simple system for naming large numbers using the French suffix 'illion' for 'million' and adding prefixes for powers of a million (see OED). So a billion was (10 ^ 6) ^ 2 and by extension trillion was (10 ^6) ^ 3. A billion today was called a thousand million then. However the US pushed for the value of 10 ^ 9 as a billion (with trillion as 10 ^ 12) and back in 1975 that became the 'world' standard.

The world standard for English -- the long scale is standard in many other languages.

That's why 'world' was in quotes. Hubris is tedious, nationalist or otherwise. I remember visiting someone's oversized digs who had an old Sony 3/4 inch videocassette archives of Charles Kuralt's 'On the Road' series. In one, Kuralt was whining about Jimmy Carter's attempts to impose the metric system as US standard and ended his rant with 'there's nothing romantic about a centimeter worm' [from some 'inch worm measuring a marigold' pop song]. That general sentiment held and subsequent attempts at metrification fizzled out. And we know what impact mixed standards had on construction of the mirror for the Hubble space telescope.

I'm not 100% on this, but I am pretty sure 億 was not always "hundred-million" since the numbering system shifted sometime between the historical/modern writing systems.

Isn't this the case for every word? I would cut off my right hand if you found, for example, the word banana in old texts from the time before bananas were discovered.

It's fortunate that the presence in the text would be evidence of earlier discovery.

(I think I get what you meant, but it's hard to express that meaning succinctly and not fall into the above trap)

I think the word googolplex was invented before anyone really needed it.

But I agree with you, that it would generally be silly to invent words for concepts that have not yet been met by any speakers.

Indeed, there are some exceptions. In the book "La Colmena" (I guess it is called "The Hive" in English), by Camilo Jose Cela, there is a man who invents words. He meets with writers in a café, and all of them listen to him with much expectation: "did you invent any new word, master?" and he says something like "Bizcotur" and everybody acclaims him: "Wonderful!", "Sublime!".

How about 'decies centena milia'? Latin was cultural language back than. Ancient Rome city had population a few millions and they often did census which involved hundreds of millions people.

Though they don't mention it explicitly, Latin would have used "milia milia" to represent million. The term "one thousand squared" (mili-one) was invented later.

did any word exist before we needed it?

Googolplex

> there was no word for “million” in Old English, a medieval predecessor of the language you’re currently reading

This sentence is a fantastic example of why translation is so hard!

Would the concept of thousand be a mistake since it does not represent a hundred hundreds ? Or it did not really appear with the same needs as million ?

Consider Tagalog, which commonly uses native small numbers, Spanish for mid-sized numbers, and English for larger, financial quantities.

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