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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

M is a stand-in for the Roman numeral Φ, or 'mille' which is the Latin word for 'thousand'.

So MM is thousand thousand's, or million.

The reason it was adopted in finance was because M means thousand, except in English where we adopted M to mean million.

Of course metric units where M = million makes more sense today, though. It's a legacy thing that stuck around.

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Greek numeral Phi ?

I can't find a Roman use from quick searching, and the Greeks represented 500,000 with it.

It's not like exact, but the apostrophus form of Roman numerals used something like forward and backward C’s separated by a vertical bar for a thousand, in place of the conventional M, and this sometimes reduced to something that looked similar to a phi. But calling M a placeholder for that seems accurate, as M was the more common form (and there was also I with a horizontal bar over it, though that seems a later innovation.)

Well no it isn't..

MM would be 2 thousands - as in the representation of the year 2019 as MMXIX (2x1000 + 10 + (10-1))

Anyway, MM is clearly man-month or 2 digit month of the year when you stringify a date... we don't need more.

> Well no it isn't..

> MM would be 2 thousands - as in the representation of the year 2019 as MMXIX (2x1000 + 10 + (10-1))

> Anyway, MM is clearly man-month or 2 digit month of the year when you stringify a date... we don't need more.

Tell that to the entire practice of accountancy.

Sorry - I wasn't saying accountants "didn't do it" - just that "they shouldn't" My pedantic (and massively down-voted post I now notice) was just an expression of my annoyance at mixing syntax. I'd also have accepted "M" as "a million" and therefore MM being 1,000,000,000,000... but they didn't do that either..

Why shouldn't they? What makes one standard more viable than the next?

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