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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2025 13:39:14 +0200
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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.