My comment got pinned?!!! Dude, no frickin wayyy Btw thanks 😊😊😊

It goes on in Hindi, my mom taught me counting in Hindi and I learnt the system went like lakh, crore, arab, kharab, neel, padma, shankh. In practical usage though, I have never heard anything after arab. We measure the world population as 7 arab plus. But after that, even news and books shift to billion and trillion. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

I like that India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire uses the term "crorepati" in place of millionaire, which means Indian contestants win 10 times more than a million (in rupees, but 10 times less then a million in pounds).

@@AkshayVasant agree, but while those words are known in the counting systems of South Asia, it is important to remember that only lakhs and crores made their way into English. For example a cheque written in India will say “one lakh”, not “one hundred thousand”. The other words you named do not make it into written or spoken English.

We also have Padma (100 Nēil) and Shankh (100 padma), where the highest number we ever needed to measure was 10000 shankh...

Well done!

Haha 😄

Indeed the right place to play with words ;)

As well, one can at least Google myriameter = 10 km

Plethora.

Not true

@@ronaldnixon8226because I’m definitely gonna trust Ronald Nixon

@@ronaldnixon8226 Explain?

what about the ‰o?

​@@gabenugget114 % = per cent ‰ = per mille

@@KodakYarr i mean the per myriad

@@gabenugget114 don't think "per myriad" is used. But in chemistry and pharmacy, for really small amounts (or concentrations) "parts per million" and "parts per billion" are used, no special symbols, abbreviated as ppm and ppb.

At least in America, a mill is still used by real estate agents, as tax rates on the properties are measured by the thousandths (so relating to mille). They also use the term millage. Though I think most Americans would rather not use the term as we tend to be fond of our own usual versions of counting.

Well now, that's kind of the point, isn't it? Numberphiles emphatically are not scientists, they are number-lovers! You'd get better stats from lab scientists and engineers who use modern number prefixes to be as precise as possible when communicating critical data. Yes, modern large-number words are messy and ugly, but they are also _understood,_ without ambiguity, by the vast majority of English-speaking scientists, engineers, and economists. I love the history of words, and can recall poring through dictionaries as a child to find out where a word came from and how new words were created. But let's not forget that the central purpose of words is not just history, but something called communication. If you forget that part of it, you lose track of why we have all these funny sounds coming out of our mouths in the first place.

@@TerryBollinger You're right, words and speach are more about communication than about anything else. In order to avoid those ambiguities you rightfully mentioned in your comment scientists more often than not use the so called 'scientific notation'. Using this notation the number 1,000 for example becomes 1*10^3 which is as unambiguous as it can get.

@@TerryBollinger No, most of us are mathematicians and would never want to be associated with something so crass and vulgar as the sciences. But one thing we mathematicians are not is ambiguous, we go further out of our way than any other discipline to precisely define our terms, sets, objects, and, indeed, anything we work with. And people have created conventions for base 12 arithmetic, none of which are any more ambiguous than the standard system of base 10 arithmetic. Ultimately, mathematicians are the only people who use numbers in such a way that the radix of the system actually matters (except maybe computer engineers, but they're forced to work in base 2 no matter what), if you're just going to turn everything into a decimal and not worry about exact solutions it really doesn't matter if you're using base 10 or base 12 or base 23, it's all completely arbitrary.

@@costakeith9048 that was a fun read, thanks! Now, to be precise, there have been periods of time when computer designers experimented with other bases, including base 3 and, my all-time favorite, base -2 (try it, it's fun!) You might be surprised how much I've been looking into the issue of mathematical precision in the past few months, such as how the utterly non-physics-compatible trick of using piecemeal functions with hidden infinities at their edges to achieve oh-so-comforting infinite differentiability in distribution functions that, at their limits, are used to formalize the casually introduced Dirac delta function. Ah, and sets... what an astonishingly cognitive-capability-dependent concept those are! Math is incredibly powerful, but it has... well, interesting issues, not the least of which is that until mathematicians recognize and formalize how much their survival-shortcut-designed brains are contributing to their emotions of "certainty," it is impossible to be formal in a fully precise way.

@@costakeith9048 In computing hexadecimal is more common than binary as it's easier to work with but converts to and from binary very simply. Practically speaking in computing there are only three numbers; zero, one and many.

Isn't there also an idiom where "the ten thousand things" means "everything", kind of like "the universe"?

And the Chinese say "yi" (億) or "wanwan" (萬萬) for 100 million.

I know that from the number tiles in mah jong. Some sets use a different character for "ten thousand" though. (Apparently the suits all originally represented numbers of coins. The circles are individual coins, the "bamboos" are really strings of 100 coins, and the character tiles represent myriads of coins.)

@@MattMcIrvin And wan is sometimes written as 卍!

@@Blaqjaqshellaq four sided shuriken strikes again! The manji and swastika are related symbols. Actually buddhism ended up spreading Indian symbols like the lotus and the swastika throughout asia, but it also carried with it Sanskrit. Some very common Japanese and Chinese words originate from Sanskrit (zen->dhanya)

same.... in particular, as in my mothertongue German a billion remained a million million....

@@andreasrehn7454 Yes, except when Germans speak in English and use the short billion so I never know for sure. Using a thousand million for a billion is wrong. But the Americans also adopted the smaller gallon for volume. Ban this old words for metric prefixes and be done with it.

The US billion has its base in the financial sector. Essentially the super rich wanted a way to differentiate between the 1 000 000+aires and the 1 000 000 000+aires as they were essentially different classes. The word "million" was already in common usage, so to use a similar word such as "billion" was done for simplicity. So the answer as to "why" is capitalism and status basically.

It hasn’t changed the Americans just believe it has

@@Dancestar1981 Yeah but they'll damn well make sure _everyone_ knows about it!

But it's a regular and defined convention. I'm pissed off that again something irrational but American won. You take multiples of 6 zeroes and that's the -ion base for the number. A thousand times that is a -iard. It could have been so simple.

We use the same words - miljard, miljoen, biljoen, triljoen - in Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa, and of which Dutch is one of the parent languages. Sadly, due to global linguistic influences, these words are starting to only be used by language purists.

Same thing in german. The worst however is that most people don´t even know about it and think a english billion is a Billion instead of a Milliarde. Makes reading news hilarious sometimes...

Anyone who needs to know the difference would be using 10^9 or 10^12 depending on the local convention. They would use the number not the arbitrary name we gave it.

@@rogerszmodis Scientists, most likely. Commercial? I doubt that. One place that comes to my mind that would have had (and sometimes still might) to face confusion about the milliard/billion is in the news. And the average Joe on the street that doesn't know english (or only rudimentary) will always be confused by this.

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie

You can still sometimes hear people use "five and twenty" particularly in the context of time (five and twenty past eight). More common in some dialects.

Good point! Afrikaans -drie en twintig

@@jauneetbrun A lot of German reminds me of the archaic English we encounter in nursery rhymes. ("Fourscore and seven years ago" and "Nevermore" also have a Germanic sound.)

But is it really flipped? While counting it is very easy to say the changing part of the word first.

That's also the reason for the word: bi-million. Followed by tri-million etc., each time with another six zeros added.

@@magnushultgrenhtc 👍

Kaputt has two ts :-)

@@beageler Not in English.

@@jishcatg Let me guess, you were one of the ones responsible for "literally?" That is like literally cool!

Certainly more friendly than "sh*t ton" which a hear a lot around here.

@@rmdodsonbills Depends if you think the fires of H are less scary than a useful amount of natural fertilizer.

@@johndododoe1411 The fires of heck?

We also use f*ck-ton occasionally here in Canada, in addition to sh*t-ton. Not sure what the equivalent metric or imperial would be but it's a lot either way

@@12what34the hilariously, a lot of people in the States will use use "metric sh*t-ton" to mean a larger quantity than whatever a normal sh*t-ton is. I have no idea why since metric units are usually smaller than imperial ones, not larger (an inch is larger than a centimeter, a mile is longer than a kilometer etc). Though "sh*t-load" is generally replacing "sh*t-ton" here, which gives up on the ruse of this word referring to an actual number.

Precisely the same in Sweden. Promille is almost always referring to alcohol level in your blood, tested via your breath, and mostly when talking about limits for driving.

Exact same thing in Polish, as well.

@@kris7822 except you guys can probably take an average of 5 Permille before passing out😂💪🏼

In the UK, insurance cover is rated per mille - the premium per £1,000 potential payout. "‰" can be typed on a computer by holding down the Alt key, typing "0137" on the numeric keypad and releasing the Alt key.

Yeah, I am German and it is alwys a little confusing hearing of yet an other billionaire and thinking they have 1,000,000,000,000.

And for those of us whose father's didn't work in Southern Rhodesia and grew up in the USA what is a "British billion"?

british billion is a bi million so 10^12, a trillion a tri million 10^18 quadrillion a quad million 10^24 etc but nowadays a billion is 10^9 trillion 10^12, made more sense as it was though

@@zebbedee thank you

@@JohnRay1969 why not watch the video? ;P

It's not off topic at all. It's glorious!

I was waiting throughout the first part of the video when Rob would turn to the term hundred as formerly used in administration and still being used to vacate a seat in the House of Commons (the Chiltern Hundreds).

One theory is that "*kmtom" (hundred) is a contraction of "ten tens" - *dekm(t) being the (likely) PIE word for ten.

A Hundred was also a division of a county in England - as in a county was split into several hundreds.

@@RobWords An even more fun fact about the centum/satem differentiation is that it wasn't defined exclusively by eastness/westness. We actually have some outliers: Tocarian, an Indoeuropan language spoken in odiern Xinjiang, in China (yes, there actually was an IE language in China), even though was considerably eastern, had känt/kante (depending on the variety) as its word for 100. This was a revolutionary discovery and made us rethink about what we knew of the centum/satem origin story. Now the scientific consensus states that the satem innovation happened later than what we knew of, spreading from the centre of IE influence outwards, and so the only languages that remained untouched by this innovation were the Occidental IE languages, and Tocarian!

Wow. It shows 2 month ago now - and 142 000 subs 😮

152k

The fellow who dropped in had just finished off the myriad of beers Rob left behind.

@@MrVvulf And now more than 200 000!

Same in Sweden

Same in Poland. We have "procent" (%) and "promil" (the same character as Francesco typed). Typically, we use "promil" in only one instance: the amount of alcohol in blood.

Same in Slovenia :)

same in Denmark

@@jarekferenc1149 Same in Germany!

Blimey, that's no small difference

why is there numbers after the letters for English transliteration. is it the intonation

@@chairwood Yes

What does Cantonese call a trillion?

@@Anonymous-df8it 一萬億

12 dozen = 1 gross

@@batya7 Thanks, I was not sure, same word in French "grosse". And I should know the Thai word, but it is that part of vocabulary I don't use often enough to be able to recall it, but that I will understand if I hear it in context.

Thai also has a different word for 10000

@@thaimapping Chai krub. Although, when I was still very new at speaking Thai, I used "sip pan" and it was understood.

Once upon a time I worked on a project in India, and had to get used to lakh and crore. I had forgotten about these until I saw this video. Speaking about counting by twelves, it's interesting that English has the word "dozen" for twelve of something. This seems to be fading away in the U.S. A few years ago I went into a shop and asked for a dozen donuts or somesuch, and the young lady behind the counter had no idea what I was asking for. But we still buy eggs by the dozen.

We do the same in Denmark 🙂

Promil is used in Hebrew as well to figuratively mean a small fraction, and also to literally mean one in a thousand, or a tenth of a percent. According to the Hebrew Wikipedia entry, it's used mostly in economics and in nature studies. In English I think ppm (parts per million) is more commonly used.

Same in Germany! 🥂🍻🥴🚓

DUI is officially termed 'promillekørsel' (promille driving) in Denmark and refers to the relative amount of alcohol in your bloodstream measured in promille.

In Poland you can have up to 0,2‰ alcohol in blood without punishment, if you drive a car.

It wouldn't be eleven-teen and twelve-teen though, because that would add 10 to those numbers and make 21 and 22. The question is why aren't they called one-teen and two-teen?

@@althejazzman Or something like firsteen and second-teen, since we have thirteen and fifteen not three-teen and five-teen

That made me wonder if the French have some hexadecimal history... There's 10 kinds of people. Those who know hexadecimal, and F the rest...

​​@@althejazzman indeed, in Chinese the word system uses their words for 10-1 (ten-one) to mean 11 and their words for 10-2 to mean 12, etc. all the way to 2-10 (two-ten) to mean 20 and 2-10-1 to mean 21, 2-10-2 to mean 22 and so on until they get to their distinct number for 100.

​@@HotelPapa100 why don't the French have distinct numbers for 80 and 90? It has always seemed so unwieldy to have to say 4-20 (four -twenty) for 80 and 4-20-10 (four-twenty-ten) for 90. Yes, the French gain some of this tongue time back with their use of the short single syllable word cent for hundred, but still... what's going on with 80 and 90 there?

Well, depends on how you would go about that. Many people say things like "one hundred and ten" and mean 110, but in mathematics that would mean 100.10 (one hundred and 10 hundredths, which then just shortens to one hundred and one tenths).

@@bodyrumuae2914 it does NOT depend! A Hundred and Ten means 110. you aussh0le

@@MrMCLvideo You must not have taken mathematics. Edit: Was thinking on this some more. Your argument proves you also don't know how to write a check. Public schools tend to teach how to write checks and balance check books in some math classes and economics.

@@bodyrumuae2914 I am not even american (and I am very proud of that), so your imagined feelings of superiourity just because you took mathematics and learned to dissect a normal number that everyday people would use and say are competely invalid. We use millions and milliards, btw. I don't NEED to write checks but, as a matter of fact, I am sufficient enough in english and familiar with american overspending culture that I know how to write 'one hundred and eleven' on a fvcking check! I still think that it does not depend! Just because you're a math nerd doesn't make a hundred and ten 100.10! Also, when you _really_ thought about it, you would have realized that you debunked your own argument when you accused me of being too stupid to even learn basic accounting skills in an underwhelming educational environment. If I write someone a check with the number 110 and the words 'one hundred and ten', they're getting 110$, not 100 dollars and 10 cents 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@@MrMCLvideo *One hundred and 11/100

Biblical 40 is literally the value 40 inthe original Hebrew, not "big number." Forty years in the desert, Moses was 40 days on the mountain to receive the Torah.

So some people claim. Others (like another reply) books to the number being literally true. My own view is that we don't really know either way, and that it doesn't really alter the devotional value of the scriptures anyway.

Apparently the word quarentine is based on the Italian for 40 days which was how long they kept diseased ships offshore until safe to bring them in to port.

Hebrew has/had indeed ways to express large numbers. e.g. EX 38:26: "603550 men". The 40 years was always referred to literally, e.g. Jos 14:10. The ~700 km of journey took months to walk according to the texts, followed by some 39 years mostly camping around Kadesh Barnea. 40 is often said to symbolize "time of ordeal, testing". Also it is said to signify one generation.

@@nilskangas4188 and there is a direct textual reference that it was a generation so that example does not rely on the 40yrs being figuratively a generation. Of the Israelites who left Egypt exactly two actually entered the "promised land", everyone else of that generation died en route, even Moses himself only got to see the land from a mountain top, according to the scriptural account Mnemonic poem from my Sunday School days: Joshua the son of Nun And Caleb the son of Jephunneh Were the only two That ever got through To the land of the milk and the honey

I disagree. Yes, it's pretty nice mathematically speaking but you would need to alterate between -ard and -ion suffixes. Million - Billion - Trillion progression is just much more understandable for everyday speech.

Trust me. As someone who has the million/milliard in my language. Its not hard at all to understand.

Nah, we prefer 1000(1000)ⁿ. 1000(1000)⁰ "zerillion" thousand 1000(1000)¹ m-illion 1000(1000)² b-illion 1000(1000)³ tr-illion etc.

@LoneEagle2061, please check out the @David Sturm reply, its just as logical. And @Bakismannen - trust me, as someone who has the million/milliard in my language, it's really hard to speak to the english speaking world

Not unreasonable at all.

I think that Brits and Americans should use the milliard, billiard etc., bringing more harmony between languages.

@@jauneetbrun But Americans won't agree to that, because Americans are "special", in every sense of the word.

I'm one of those cheerfully special Americans, and I hereby do freely confess to feeling a profound sense of peace and joy when, as I grew older, I could finally read a piece of scientific literature and not have to spend minutes trying to figure out whether some large number in the text meant what every _other_ English-speaking scientist in the world meant, or instead was an, um... _special_ use of the word.

@@djtwo2 Like children with "special needs"... ?

Similarity between thousand and douze cent is with big chance from the PiE root of the word

Brit here, same. Also should there be a long thousand (1,200)?

@@stephenlee5929 probably.....it's just like eggs I guess, they tend to be sold in dozens ( in Australia anyway) or bread rolls ( half dozen, or dozen...and sometimes the Baker's dozen-13 ), and yet my week old fridge only has a tray for 7 eggs ....go figure ?🤣

This Kiwi experienced the same thing, and concurs with your opinion of creeping American linguistic imperialism.

@@heathertruskinger6214 maybe you're supposed to only buy half dozen when you have a single egg left? Or the designers were a bit lazy and just turned out a tray with the number of holes that fit with their tray dimensions rather than designig around more commonly used numbers. Just thinking out loud 🙊

@@heathertruskinger6214 Dozen eggs here too in USA. I will have to use lakh and crore. Mr. Rob didn't mention score, though I hoped.

it was widely used in local metric systems but was not included in the SI. Myriameter was for example used in Germany extensively.

I would like to see a highway sign in Megameters, to the outer planets

388.6Mm to The Moon ^

Aw, vielen Dank!

and "nif" is 36 (ie 6 squared) in the Ndom language. They use base-6 which is a pretty *nifty* way to count.

Yes. Billiards is called that because of the number of points needed to win.

@@Ggdivhjkjl, how long would it take to score a billiard? 🤔 the maximum points you can get in a strike is 10. Lets over-estimate the speed you could play by saying you do a strike every second. - you would need 100 long billion seconds = 10^14 seconds = 3 million years. hmmmm 🤔

@@JNCressey Does this explain why it wasn't me who won the Euromillions on Tuesday and how many years I'll need to buy a ticket for my turn to come up? (lol)

Base twelve (or base 60, 12 *5) was very common in the ancient world. The year was thought to have 360 days (60 *6 or 12 *30), so therefore a circle is divided 360 degrees, also 24 hours in a day (12 hours sunlight, 12 hours dark on the equinox), 60 minutes to the hour, 60 seconds to the minute. Fractions were also well done in base 60, as "one-third" is much better as "20/60" than our modern "0.33333". Ancient numbering systems can be really fun, just like language.

As someone presently learning Spanish and constantly falling over this I have only recently gotten my head around 2 things 1/ We tend to use infinitive constructions to convey the same thing / idea, 2/ *ONLY* the 3rd person singular is different from the indicative in all English verbs _except "to be"_ but there are these few ways to get into their train of thinking and "see it in action"; the first is you _MUST_ use / get the word *THAT* as the linking word to make the subordinate clause in the subjunctive 'appear' and secondly, you can only 'see' it in action (meaning a difference in the inflection and spelling of the verbs) if you use the 3rd person singular (except when using "to be") else you won't notice it as different anyway. What is the difference in the 3rd person? *_it drops the 'S'_* Examples: Getting the word THAT in it sentence in place of an infinitive. Instead of saying "He needs to buy eggs from the corner shop." say "It is necessary *that* he *buy* eggs from the corner shop. Instead of "He wants her to tidy her room" say "He wants *that* she *tidy* her room. And always incorporating THAT to begin the subjunctive clause: It's disgraceful *that* the prime minister *lie* to parliament; It's imperative *that* he *understand* spoken Russian; The bank manager hopes *that* he *repay* the loan; Your future success demands *that* you *be* curious. The English subjunctive IS there, we use (the idea of) it all the time but it's hidden in plain sight either in with the indicative (because the forms for I, you, we & they are all the same anyway) or because we use "subjective infinitive constructions" to convey 'subjunctive' meaning... And this really isn't very well explained by any of the ENGLISH SPEAKING authors of any of the *_myriad_* of 'learn Spanish' books I've read trying to get my brain around poor explanations. _The above examples are my 'foggy' understanding of what appears to work when translating._ Good luck!

This comment is too wholesome, I'm out of here

Interestingly, some languages emphasize score based counting, calling 60 3-score, 87 as 4 score and 7. Seeing the long hundred in this video made me think it was 6-score, not 10-dozen.

@@johndododoe1411 In traditional Cornish, score was used in counting, just as you exemplify above. In fact, even when English was taking over from Cornish as the main language and in my boyhood days, I can remember the farmers referring to pigs as 'so many score' in weight.

@@tewennow Yep, Cornish uses vigesimal counting similar to French - ugens (20), dew-ugens (40), tri-ugens (60), peswar-ugens (80) as I'm sure you're aware, just pointing it out in case there is anyone here who doesn't know any Cornish ;)

@@johndododoe1411 It’s called a vigesimal system and it’s quite common. French and Celtic languages use it. There’s also sexagesimal (base 60) which we still use today when talking about trigonometry, telling time, and dates (360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes in an hour, 360 days in a lunar year) because the Babylonians used sexagesimal counting. They used it for the same reason as base-12: really easy to divide it. 12 goes into 60!

Great to have you on board!

In parts of Papua-New Guinea and some of the surrounding islands, some of the more isolated peoples only have words for 1,2,3,4,5 and many. One of the more interesting explanations is that the human brain can only grasp up to 5 objects in a single glance. Any more than that and we have to count them.

That number only includes protons, neutrons, neutrinos and electrons. It does not include photons, gluons, quarks, dark matter, etc, so the actual number of particles in the observable universe is bigger than 10^80

@@XEinstein science can't currently measure dark matter and therefore we can't count them in. Sabine Hossenfelder has a video explaining that - it's her area if expertise.

Thanks Susan

fortnight is fourteen nights. i don't know about the others tho. i've always assumed that minutes and seconds in the context of time must have come from divisions of a degree but that's probably wrong

@@sidarthur8706 I seem to recall the word 'second' in relation to the time unit comes from it being the second division of the hour, the first division being 'minute'.

In Hebrew, the word for month- chodesh- comes from the word for new, "chadash", because the month begins on the night of the new moon.

If you like this type language archeology, I recommend "The history of English" podcast.

Terve Okaro, would you know the numbers larger than miljardia in Finnish. I do not remember, but do you have a mixup like the Slavs thereafter or do you have biljoona, biljardia, triljoona, triljardia, ...?

@tacfoley Which are the same numbers, as 100_base12 is 144_base10.

@@Ruhrpottpatriot Base 6 is better.

screws for woodwork the retailer used to open a gross box that had 144 in it and get out the half dozen you wanted

@@Anonymous-df8it Base 6 isn't better. You can't count it cleanly with your hands like base 5, base 10 or base 12, common divisors like 1/4 are not even numbers, and for the rest it's like base 12 or base 60.

@@Ruhrpottpatriot 1/5=0.111111... Now tell me what 1/5 in base 12 is again? Same goes with 1/7. Base 6 can easily handle the first four primes, whereas base 12 has fifths and sevenths that are mathematically the worst they can be. Single digit quarters are not necessary as if you have single digit halves (even number base) and you can't be bothered to remember what a quarter is, it's trivial to derive (halving a half; halving is easy) Also, with the finger counting bit, if you used your left hand for ones and your right hand to count sixes (so that the person reading it can just read from left to right), you get a base 6 finger counting system!

myrias/myriadis and mille have NO connection, so nothing about r/l replacement. myrias is a 'invented' noun from the adjective myrios which means "numberless/countless" (and was pronounced murios 1kBC btw, just because u nowadays pronounce Y's as I's does not imply it means anything), while mille does not only mean khilioi but also comes from the same root word (+ prefixed "one" like in _semel_ "one times"): sim+khili > smi-khli > smihli > (s)milli > mille

It was a shame that we had to adopt American practice rather than them adopting ours. "Billion" contains the element "bi" indicating 2, but that doesn't help to indicate the meaning of 10^9.

Beat me to it.

@@rosiefay7283 I agree: the two-ness in 1,000,000 ^ 2 makes absolute sense.

@@rosiefay7283 Yes it does: a thousand multiplied by a thousand *twice*. There's your 2. A trillion is a thousand multiplied by a thousand thrice. And so on. It matches the pattern in how large numbers are written, in blocks of 3 zeros or thousands, not in millions or blocks of 6 zeros. 1,000,000 not 1,000000 1,000,000,000 not 1000,000000 The American pattern, ironically, also matches the pattern used for ordering prefixes in the Metric system. Btw, the old pattern went as follows in increasing magnitude: Thousand Million Milliard Billion Billiard Trillion Trilliard etc I rather doubt most people would actually regard that as particularly logical because instead of just having to remember to increment the prefix for each expansion of a thousand, instead you have to remember to increment the prefix for each expansion of a million but also to switch the suffix for an intervening expansion of a thousand.

@@rosiefay7283 Quite right. But bi-(mi)llion meaning a million times a million does make sense.

What a great idea - America's national debt is only a fraction of a googolplex, _sorry, I meant googolplexplex..._ (lol)

I find the current system aesthetically pleasing. A million is a (thousand) thousands. A billion (bi = 2) is a (thousand, thousand) thousands. A trillion (tri = 3) is a (thousand, thousand, thousand) thousands. An octillion (oct = 8) is a (thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand) thousands. Et cetera, until you make yourself sick.

@@timsmith2525 you know that there's a million and a milliard, a billion and a billiard, a trillion and a trilliard etc. etc. A trilliard f.x. is a thousand million million millions (A billion trillion): 1 followed by twenty-one zeros, 10^21.

@@yllbardh Yes, I do.

maybe because i by itself looks so small and lonely. 🙂

I thought it would refer to a name, but then You, They, She and He should all be capitalised too. I have no idea why :\

I don't know, I have no expertise in linguistics, but I would doubt that. One other big language of the germanic family, german, is known for it's compound words. I wouldn't think there never were alternative words, but I wouldn't think it the rule.