Conference thebay::joyoflex

   >>  How much money is $10M?  ten thousand?  ten million??
     
    By current convention, I believe, it's used only for "million" (altho
    you're right that the Roman Numeral designation confuses the issue...)
    
    - Steve, always_trying_to_help  

   That's a though one.  I've seen both, but M is mille (1,000) in French.
   You really have to tell by context.  If they're describing income ranges,
   10M for 10,000,000 annual income sounds too good, unless you're talking
   about Japenese Yen.  However, in company balance sheets and North American
   newspaper headlines, 10M usually refers to 10,000,000.

    
    
    
    I've seen the "M" suffix used after quanities (as in catalogs) where I
    believe it indicates units of 1,000.  Very confusing if you ask me.   
    
    
    

    I have decided to use $10,000 for clarity.
    
    Thanks for the input,
    
    Chris.

    Here in the trenches where we forecast sales, revenues, and the like, I
    often see (well, not as often now as we used to!) $10MM instead of just
    $10M, meaning "ten million dollars U.S." 
    
    I wonder what the second M is for? Is Roman MM = One Thousand Thousands?
    

    Until about 15 years ago, the suffix M meant thousands, copied from
    Roman Numerals or maybe from French.  The computer industry used to
    use K because M meant millions (approximately) here.  I once saw a
    classified ad in the U.S.A. for a computer job with a salary in M
    instead of K -- only once, while it was still common in other industries.
    (Yes, of course M is common here in English-language advertisements,
    and it means millions.)  Anyway, other industries seemed to switch
    from M to K as desktop computing became more pervasive.
    
    >I wonder what the second M is for? Is Roman MM = One Thousand Thousands?
    
    No.  Roman XXIII is 23 and Roman MM is 2,000.

    	The mixture of Roman and Arabic numerals in the same "word" is just
    confusing, particularly since "M" is the standard scientific *prefix*
    for indicating a million times a quantity.
    
    	Thus, 10k$ or 10M$ would be correctly understood by someone with
    scientific training to be ten thousand and ten million dollars
    respectively.
    
    	If the "M" in question is supposed to be Roman then for consistency
    all numerals in the document should be Roman, and the Arabic numerals
    should be dropped.
    
    	My dictionary does not list a Roman numeral of greater value than
    "M" so I suspect that ten thousand would be "MMMMMMMMMM". Equally,  if
    it understood that the "M" is Roman then "$10M" ought to be nine
    hundred and ninety dollars.

    Notes .6 and .7 put their finger on the problem: Roman namerals are
    just no good for multiplying with. If you want to multiply efficiently
    (not just by adding again and again, like computers) you need a zero -
    itself an Arabic concept.
    
    So there are five languages involved: English, Latin, French,  Greek,
    and Arabic (introduced, admittedly slightly frivolously, by myself).
    This makes abbreviations impossibly confusing.  I agree that the
    context makes it clear that a salary in dollars or pounds is probably a
    number of thousands rather than a number of millions, but I often
    wonder whether - in this context - `10K' means 10,000 or 10,240
    (ignoring, as probably ruled out by the context - unless the
    prospective employer is an extraordinary skinflint - 4,096; or that
    other number that would translate from a proper decimalization of the
    quantity referred to by software engineers as `10 K'; or ...[the
    confusion, not without irony, multiplies itself]). But it's fairly
    obvious that when a sports commentator talks about distance runners
    doing `10K', they mean `10,000 metres'; only a pedant (who, me?) would
    insist on runners completing a 10,240  metre course.
    
    But all this just goes to show that foreign abbreviations cause
    problems of understanding and translation. In writing, I spell such
    quantities out; in speech, if I'm _really_ short of breath, I say `ten
    thou' (which confuses mechanical engineers, for whom a `thou' is a
    thousandth of an inch)
    
    b

    I had this discussion with my mother several years ago.  For about
    seven decades she had used M to mean thousand. (She learned that, I
    suppose, during her five years of high school Latin.)  She didn't know
    what K meant.  She was getting confused by the newspapers which had
    started using M for million and K for thousand.  Since she now knows
    that the M can have two meanings, she can figure out which by context.

    I seem to recall that putting a bar over a Roman numeral multiplies it
    by a thousand, so that a million is represented by an M with a bar.

re scientific prefixes (prefices?)

It was mentioned earlier that M is used as a scientific prefix for one
million, and k [sic] for one thousand.  True (except that it is not k;
it is K), but those letters are used as prefixes to the units of
measurment, not to the numeral.   E.g., 10 Km race, 1.23 Kg.   The K and
the M are pronounced as kilo- and mega- respectively. 

I, too, learned that M was a Latin-based abbreviation for 'thousand'.
When I worked as an application programmer in commercial companies,
'M' invariably meant thousand (and 'C' and 'D' were used sometimes
to mean hundred, and five hundred).

Yup.  You have to get the meaning out of context.

Dave C.

    Yup, I also vaguely remember that a Roman numeral with a bar would
    be multiplied by a thousand.  So then, a Roman numeral with an orgy
    would be multiplied by how much?
    
    On the other hand, I thought 0 was invented by the Hindus and copied
    by the Arabs.
    
    And what do you call this little snippet:
    >Yup.  You have to get the meaning out of context.
    Meaning?  Out of context?  Oxymoron!