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Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify - MM actually just represents 'million' where a single M represents 'thousand'.

The plural part of your definition here is not really relevant.. i.e. 10M = ten thousand, 10MM = ten million, 1M = 1 thousand (not 1 million, singular)

Most people colloquially seem to use k for 'thousand' and most people would probably intuit M as 'million', but I think people still go with MM for avoidance of doubt.

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It's the french system:

10M, ten thousand

10MM, ten million

10MMM, ten billion

here in sec. 3: https://www.druide.com/fr/enquetes/abréviation-de-million-et...

And "M" dates back to the Roman number 1000.

One would think that a metric country would adopt "k"/kilo as the indicator for thousands and "m"/mega for millions.

Still I suppose it's better than sussing out whether someone is British and using "long" billions.

(in most of the world, "billion" = 10 to the 9th power; in older British usage still sometime seen, "billion" = 10 to the 12th power, and 10^9 is "thousand million")

Well they're french, so M stands for Mille (one thousand). MM is just a thousand squared, and MMM is a thousand qubed.

Once you understand this system you might also understand why the long system makes more sense.

  1000                 = Mille     M
  1000 000             = Million   MM
  1000 000 000         = Milliard  MM M
  1000 000 000 000     = Billion   MM MM 
  1000 000 000 000 000 = Billiard  MM MM M

in the short system the billion (nine zeros) has nothing to do with two. while in the long system it represents double as many zeros as the million. a trillion has three times the Zeros. -ard suffix? add 3 zeros

As someone who used to speak decent French, you will never convince me that the language is rational with respect to numbers. The sometimes-decimal/sometimes-vigesimal thing still makes my head spin all these years later when I hear numbers being spoken in French.

"Still I suppose it's better than sussing out whether someone is British and using "long" billions."

Britain does not use "long" billions. Not since the 1970s or so. Now days, billion always means 1000 million.

Many other European languages, on the other hand, do use the long scale.

That’s correct. But when speaking or writing in English, the English conventions should be used.

Never knew this, never seen it in my line of work. Thanks for the clarification.

CPM in advertising. Cost per Mille (per one thousand views).

In the US, UK, and other English-speaking countries, "m" (note lower case) is used for million.

From the Guardian style guide:

"million - in copy use m for sums of money, units or inanimate objects: £10m, 45m tonnes of coal, 30m doses of vaccine; but million for people or animals: 1 million people, 23 million rabbits, etc; use m in headlines"

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