Hacker News Reader

India commonly uses Lakh for 10^5 1,00,000 and Crore for 10^7 1,00,00,000. After that, there's Arab at 10^9, Kharab at 10^11, Neel at 10^13, and Padma 10^15, but as a US person, I've never seen those used, although I've seen Lakh and Crore. Sometimes lakh crore shows up, which is 10^12 or a (short) trillion, but sometimes trillion is used for that in documents otherwise using lakhs and crores and not billions or millions.

View on HN

(I'm Indian.) Yes, India groups the first three digits and then subsequent groups are two digits, eg 12,34,56,789. So instead of hundred thousand it's lakh, and instead of hundred lakhs it's crore. We never learned any numbers above crore in school. I remember hearing about arab from other kids but never saw it used, and I never heard about the others you mentioned.

It's a shame they didn't want to go one more 00, because that nicely lines up with a billion

... Or milliard, or giga

In Japan and China you use groups of 10,000, so there's 万 (1e4), the largest bill (10,000 yen); 億 (1e8, 100 million), the approximate population of Japan and a convenient unit for housing prices in yen; and 兆 (1e12, 1 trillion), which is used for eg really expensive infra projects like new bullet trains.

On paper, there are much larger units too, but they are never used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com