Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"

On 08/04/2025 12:54, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

On Tue, 8 Apr 2025 10:29:13 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

On 07/04/2025 21:29, Richard Heathfield wrote:

Is not it "20 milliards" in British English?

>
Yes. The British use

 No we don't.
 

>
1 - one
10 - ten
100 - hundred
1 000 - thousand
10 000 - myriad
100 000 - pool
1 000 000 - million
1 000 000 000 - milliard

 Is this a late april fool?
 Absolutely no one in britain says myriad for 10K , pool (wtf?) for 100K or
milliard apart from maybe history of science professor and you'd probably be
hard pressed to find many people who'd even heard of them in that context.
The only reason I knew milliard is because I can speak (sort of) french and
thats the french billion.
 

"myriad" means 10,000, coming directly from the Greek.  But the word is usually used to mean "a great many" or "more than you can count".  (It's like the use of "40" in the Bible - I guess the ancient Greeks were better at counting than the ancient Canaanites.)
You are unlikely to find the word "myriad" meaning specifically 10,000 outside of translated Classical Greek or Latin literature, or in old military history contexts.
I have not heard of the word "pool" meaning 100,000.  But then, I am not as old as Richard :-)
In India and other parts of Asia, 100,000 has a specific name such as "lakh" - written as 1,00,000 (it's not just the digit separator that varies between country, but also where the separators are placed).

except for journalists, politicians, stockbrokers, and anyone else who
spends far too much time talking to Americans.

 Pfft. The standard mathematical million-billion-trillion sequence has been
used in the UK since at least I was at school almost 40 years ago.
 

The UK officially (as a government standard) used the "long scale" (billion = 10 ^ 12) until 1974.  Unofficially, it was still sometimes used long afterwards - equally, the "short scale" (billion = 10 ^ 9) was often used long before that.  So the short scale is the norm in the UK now (except for politicians talking about national debt - "billions" doesn't sound as bad as "trillions"), but Richard may have learned the long scale at school.