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solstice | 7 months ago

Germany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers.

Chinese:

  1 yi
  10 shi
  100 bai
  1000 qian
  10000 wan
  10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand)
  100 x 10000 bai wan (one million)
  1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million)
  1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million)
  10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)
Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...

discuss

order

ripe|7 months ago

> Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...

They write thousands just like in the U.S. system, with the same commas: 20,000. But beyond that, the "lakh" is 100k, the "crore" is 10M, and commas in written figures go in twos:

The population of Australia is about 2.8 crores: 2,80,00,000. The Delhi metro area is over 3.4 crores: 3,40,00,000.

They have more unique words for every 100-multiple unit after crore, to go along with the commas, but in everyday practice they don't use those terms. Instead, they go "long" on the crores. Thus, India's population is about 146 crores; the new Mumbai underground Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ line will cost ₹21,000 crore.

When reporting foreign money, they use the U.S. system with millions and billions as usual: ₹21,000 crore is parenthesized (US$2.5 billion).

adornKey|7 months ago

China seems to have even more scales..

  myriad scale - based on 10.000
  mid-scale    - based on 10⁸
  long scale   - based on doubling of exponent (4, 8, 16, 32, ..)