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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Is 4Mg that confusing?

If I see "4Mg" in print, it's more likely that someone erroneously capitalized the 'm' in "4 milligrams", rather than sincerely using "megagram" as a unit.

It's just not done. Maybe that's weird, or inconsistent, or whatever. But it is that way.

There is the option of just writing it out “4 megagrams”

During my undergrad we had a physics professor who would only use si units. 3,000 km became 3 megameters. A billion dollars were a gigadollar. To this day I don't know how I feel about it.

The sound of "gigadollar" really tickles my fancy. Is a penny one centidollar or ten millidollars?

A cent is already a centi dollar.

I guess, but that's longer than “4,000kg” and unusual to boot. Anyone reading it is going to convert it in their head to 4,000kg anyway. Four million grams is not something relatable. Hard to picture the weight of millions slips of paper vs. a few thousand large water bottles. Or roughly two sedans.

The megagram is on the same list as the dekaliter and the hectowatt. They don't exist :)

Yes, nobody does that. The SI base unit of mass is the kilogram, not the gram. (Yes, it's weird that that's the case. No, it's still not a good idea to buck the trend.)

...which brings us back to 4 kkg -- 4 kilokilograms!

Honestly we should just introduce a new name for the kilogram and make the gram a millifoo.

In the original version of the metric system, the base unit of mass was the grave, corresponding to the kilogram. 1/1000 of a grave was a gravet.

And from what I heard, grave sounded to much like 'duke' (in French or German), so the French Revolutionaries weren't too keen on it.

The French word for 'duke' would be 'duc' (pronounced more or less identically to the English word, for the obvious reason that the English word is borrowed from French). The German word appears to be Herzog. It's hard to see where either word might be plausibly confused with any possible pronunciation of "grave".

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_(titre) somewhat equivalent of count or earl

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graf

You are right that it wasn't the equivalent of duke. I was being a bit imprecise. Sorry.

The better English equivalent to German Graf would have been an earl.

Millifoo has a mellifluous sound to it.

Double prefixes were actually common for some of the more "extreme" magnitudes a long time ago, like this one for example:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/micromicrofarad

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