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Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

"Customers can discover over 1.2 crore products and 14,000 brands..."

I'm honestly curious: Is it prevalent to use units like lakh and crore[1] on Indian English language websites? I would have guessed that Western units like million or hundred thousand would be more common online.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian_numbering_system comes in handy.

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"Is it prevalent to use units like lakh and crore[1] on Indian English language websites?"

If you are exclusively targeting an Indian audience, then yes it makes sense. Indians calculate salaries, house prices etc in lakhs and (for rich people!) crores. If you also want non Indians to use the site, then you probably need to use "million", "hundred thousand", etc

I assume the local languages use 100,000 as a unit, and it is hard to switch units. Chinese uses 10,000 as a unit, so it also makes translation to English difficult.

There are also weird words that Indians use that are Latin rooted words, but uncommon, like "lacuna". I have never met an American that uses that word, nor an Indian that doesn't know what it means.

It's probably no worse than the "quatre-vignt-dix" ... 90 in french, literally (4*20)+10... the conversion for those fluent in the language are automatic.

Well, while peculiar, "quatre-vingt dix" is not a unit: nobody is going to say "4 quatre-vingt dix" for 360.

Yes but the vingt for 20 is used as a unit, like the archaic score as in 4-score and 7 years ago. Nobody said 4 4-score and 10 for 360 either.

Nope. Almost always done as -

1,000 - Thousand 1,00,000 - Lakh 1,00,00,000 - Crore

In what context have you heard Indians use it?

Just to mean a gap, or something missing, e.g. "there is a lacuna in the call records".

> There are also weird words that Indians use that are Latin rooted words, but uncommon, like "lacuna". I have never met an American that uses that word, nor an Indian that doesn't know what it means.

I am an Indian and I have never heard of the word "lacuna" used in the two Indian languages that am proficient in (you do know that there is not one "Indian" language, but many many of them, don't you?)

All the accounting systems and websites / apps for Indian audience follow this.

And the number separators are also handled accordingly (1 lakh is: 1,00,000) even when lakh or crore is not mentioned.

For some (lot?) of us educated in Indian numbering system but dealing with businesses outside India thanks to our everyday work it takes time to do the mental adjustment every time we see a number. :)

> 1 lakh is: 1,00,000

I assume there is no typo here?

No, there isn't a typo. 1 lakh * 1, 00, 000 * is delimited as such.

No typo. Similarly, 1 crore is 1,00,00,000.

I'm assuming the placement of the commas maps to some linguistic feature in Hindi?

Words like lakh and crore derive from Sanskrit - hence these words are prevalent not only in India but also in other countries in the south-east Asia like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

Western units are used wherever applicable - i.e. to denote 1,000 the word "thousand" is used and not "hazaar". Unfortunately, western units are deficient in that there are no units to denote a hundred thousands (lakh - 100,000) or ten millions (crore = 10,000,000). Likewise, there are no western units for 10,000 - so you have to use the Japanese word 'maan'.

It's not just websites. In India, You see it everyday on banners, bus stop advertisements or on television. It's common to read something like "A insurance, with benefit up to X lakh" in commercial breaks.

Your own article answers your question:

"The terms lakh and crore are widely used today in Indian English and Pakistani English."

I know (I lived in Pakistan as a teenager). I was just wondering if online usage differed from street usage. For better or worse, I suspect that the dominance of American companies on the web would have a homogenizing effect on English offline.

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