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Comment by crummy | Hacker News Reader

A bit odd topic but the commas seem strange in the numbers there:

>Total Vaccination Doses: 1,00,13,38,625

Is that an Indian thing?

The words for the orders of magnitude don't group by thousand like in English (*thousand, million, billion, and so on) but by thousand (hazaar), hundred thousand (lakh), ten million (crore), and I don't know what next.

So the comma separation reflects the words, as in English.

> 38,625

38 hazaar ... Vs. 38 thousand ...

> 13,38,625 vs. 1,338,625

13 lakh ... Vs. 1.3 million ...

> 1,00,13,38,625 vs. 1,001,338,625

100 crore Vs. 1.0 billion

This would no doubt be an entry in a hypothetical 'falsehoods programmers believe about numbers'! I.e. use things like Intl.NumberFormat in the browser, rather than home-grown 'group 3 digits and insert a comma then join again'.

(* yes, I'm going to conveniently ignore 'hundred' and its occasional/domain use like 'twelve hundred'.)

> The words for the orders of magnitude don't group by thousand like in English

It's not only in English, as far as I know it's almost everywhere else, the entire Western world plus its former colonies and I think even places like China.

The Indian subcontinent is the exception.

Chinese uses powers of ten thousand, I believe, but I don't know if that's reflected in the way numerals are written.

We have Arab after Crore, but it's not commonly used. We just say 1000 crore or 1 lakh crore, etc.

> use things like Intl.NumberFormat in the browser, rather than home-grown 'group 3 digits and insert a comma then join again'.

That home grown solution wouldn’t work in many western countries either, where comma is a decimal separator and dot/period is the thousands separator.

Yep, true. But don't be tempted just to iterate on it to take account of that and whatever you discover next!

Yes. Indians don’t usually break numbers down by the thousands.

After thousand, numbers are usually grouped by the hundreds.

So, for example, Indians usually use:

Number: Indian Term/Others 1000: Thousand/Thousand 100,000: Lac/Hundred Thousand 1,000,000: 10 Lac/Million 1,00,00,000: Crore/Ten Million

and so on…

It’s the Indian numeral system: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

Yes, Indian Numeral System is different. Thousand is Thousand. Hundred Thousand is 1 Lakh. 1 Million is 10 Lakhs. 10 Million is 1 Crore. 1 Billion is 100 Crores.

Yes, India doesn't use millions and billions, but lakhs and crores.

10 lakh = 1 million

100 lakh = 1 crore

Yes.

100 - Hundred 1,000 - Thousand 1,00,000 - Lakh 1,00,00,000 - Crore

We don't use millions here.

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