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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

I wish we, as a society, could decide whether M is thousand or million and then only use it to represent that one concept. From the headline I initially assumed his bail was only $250,000 and I don’t think I’m the only one in this thread to have made that mistake.

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I'm pretty sure you are. I've never seen M being used for thousand.

movie production cards. roman numerals.

i would not expect that to be the case in this context. you would also probably never mix roman numerals and arabic numerals like that.

Apparently M can mean thousand in finance: https://www.insurancejournal.com/blogs/old-republic-surety/2...

Old-school banking, M is thousand, MM is million.

Sometimes MM is thousands monthly.

It a strange world.

Example?

I've seen it in person a lot in internal corporate presentations. Maybe they've all been wrong, but that's how language works.

M is also used for thousand in adtech - cpm is a cost per millie or cost per thousand.

It has its roots in Latin. Mil means one thousand, so mil mil, aka million, is one thousand thousands. You'll see it in places that do more romance language family business, or in accounting where it's an old convention even in English.

When does M mean thousand? I've never seen that. K means thousand.

> When does M mean thousand?

Its less common now, but historically the latin-derived “M” for 1000s and “MM” for millions was dominant in finance and accounting; metric-style “k” for 1000s and “M” for millions has become more popular, but you’ll occasionally still encounter the other style.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/fixed-income...

M means milli in Latin, as in thousand (kilo comes from Greek). Millennium, millipede (thousand legs), and so on. Million just means a thousand thousands. That is why in most financial institutions, M means thousand, and MM means millions, literally thousand thousands.

Do they use MMM for billions and MMMM for trillions?

k, M, B, T, Q seem like easier to read suffixes as opposed to having to count the number of “M”s.

Yes, for billions at least. Never personally saw a bank transaction for a trillion dollars.

You are correct the others are easier, clearer, etc. But banking goes back centuries, millennia even. When an entire industry uses a certain nomenclature, no individual participant wants to go through the hassle of trying to change everything.

I’ve always found this idiotic. This isn’t Renaissance Florence, using M to mean thousand is just financier gatekeeping snobbery.

Is it more snobbish than using "k" to mean thousand?

Or perhaps institution see some value in keeping a consistent denotation when you have records spanning hundreds of years, multiple counties, and multiple languages.

Which is weird to me, because MM in latin numerals is 2,000

There is a way to express one million as M̅ (horizontal bar above M for M * 1,000), but I think this was a later addon that was not used by the Romans. They probably rarely had to deal with numbers in the millions and if they did, they could just express them as a product like M * M

> That is why in most financial institutions, M means thousand, and MM means millions

This is not the case in the United States.

Every currently employed accountant? All financial documents?

If it's US-centric, especially if talking about amounts of money, it's million. Always.

This is totally wrong.

Nope.

No, it isn't. The entire ad-tech industry is built on CPM (latin mille for thousand).

M isn’t a suffix here. It’s part of the acronym.

Right after we all learn Esperanto.

And remember to use gibibytes. On IPv6.

The Financial Times recently started using 'mn' for million, as in '$250mn'.

M representing thousand? The only people who would think that are old school snobby finance guys or bankers from Renaissance Florence.

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