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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

"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

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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.

> 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?)

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".

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