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Comment by staunton | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Hyper. Hyperloop, hyperplane... Maybe Mega? That way it's more clear what's next.

The real question is ultra before or after hyper?

Ultra and hyper mean basically the same (over, beyond), but since Greek culture flourished before Roman culture, I'd say that hyper should come before ultra.

(And do you think that coming up with all this kilo / mega / giga / tera / peta / exa set of prefixes, and deciding their order, was easy?)

Ultra and hyper mean basically the same

So does super, which is the direct Latin cognate of hyper. So ultra > super > hyper?

I would suggest the opposite, as in modern usage, the Greek words "feel" larger than the Latin ones, perhaps because they look less familiar.

Between superman and supersonic planes, super feels common and slightly old fashioned. To me "super" feels the least superior of the three.

We've already established that hypersonic > supersonic. I think a hypermarket is bigger than a supermarket. In protein structure, a hyperfamily is bigger than a superfamily.

I've never heard of an ultrasonic aeroplane, an ultramarket, or an ultrafamily. So those must be bigger yet?

They seem to refer to different domains. Supersonic is about the speed of sound, and ultrasonic is about the frequency. Superior is about being higher / better, and ulterior is about being a next step :)

> Maybe Mega? That way it's more clear what's next.

But we would have to start with kilo first.

Meta- would be my guess. Metacapacitor, metachemistry, metaconductor... It works.

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