at one time kilo was abbreviated with a K.
depends on when you learned it and how nice your lawn is.
The capital K supposedly means 1024 instead of 1000.
I’ve only ever seen it written that way with an “i” after it.
I’m with you. I’d never write Km (kilometer) any more than I’d write Mm (millimeter). The prefix is just supposed to be lowercase. The spacing thing bugs me too, but I’ve read enough grad student theses at this point that do this that I’ve given up bring the overly picky outside reader.
In the 90’s, I worked as a print buyer and when I’d specify a certain number of thousands of circulars or envelopes, etc., I’d refer to thousands as “M”.
I’d bet every mystery and gangster book and movie (and radio and comic strip and…) used G for Grand from the 20s to 50s. At least. 100K is much newer. I’m 64 and I remember how weird it felt for one to replace the other.
Preach it.
I work in a government R&D lab. I use NIST’s Guide for the Use of the International System of Units as the one and only authority for rules governing the proper use of numbers and units.
In section 7.2 it states,
(Emphasis added.)
I’ve told the other engineers a thousand times that there should be a space between the numerical value and its symbol. But when I edit their reports I still see this over and over:
5VDC
18W
25ºC
10Ω
And don’t even get me started on sentence spacing. I am the only one in our lab who uses one space after a period. :mad: When I receive a report to edit, I have to do a global replace to convert all the double spaces to single spaces. And then when I’m finished, I do a global replace to convert all the single spaces (after each period) to double spaces. (If I leave it with single spaces, all kinds of hell will rain down upon me. Trying to convince them of the error of their ways is futile - they were taught to insert two spaces after each period, and thus that’s the way it must be.)
Mm (millimeter) was never correct.
To address the capital K thing, K means Kelvin, not kilo-.
…because Mm means megameter.
People still might say “50 G’s.” But I’ve never seen anyone type it out like you would with 50k. To me, “50g” means you’re playing Final Fantasy.
I’ll submit that K = 1024 and k = something multipled by 10 to the 3rd power.
My understanding of Engineering Notations tells me that a number multiplied by 10 raised to a positive multiple of 3 has an upper case prefix abbreviation, and if it’s raised to a negative multiple of 3, it has a lower case prefix abbreviation. And the agreement to stick to this convention sent those conventioners dashing to the Greek alphabet to come up with the letter “mu” to symbolize the “micro” prefix because the lower case Greek letter “mu” looks like a lower case, Roman alphabet “u”.
I only remember G or Grand = $1,000 from old gangster movies, tv shows, or from people who picked up the reference from gangster entertainment.
but K was used for kilo. m as a prefix always was milli, M always was mega.
Right. That was my point. K (capitalized) has meaning all by itself. k (lowercase) as a prefix for kilo should be lowercase. That’s what I was taught anyway.
K replaced “degree Kelvin” °K in 1967.
K was used as the prefix and that was switched away from/
I was surprised the other week to hear after a long absence, large, meaning a thousand — with a gangster accent, laage.
“Youse owes me 10 laage, piker, so pay up or yous’ll be eaten’ breakfast tru a straw!”
I heard it on a current-season TV show. Maybe Sherlock, where it didn’t seem to belong. I’d hear it once in a while on the original Law and Order.
I wonder which is older, g’s or large.
And naturally, our master addressed this question, years ago.
Ahh, a scientist.
There is a separate engineering standard for engineering drawings and specifications, and the ISO standard way to label 1000 ohm is “1K0” (one K zero). “One point eight ohm” is shown as “1R8”.
It is conventional to show the precision separately: “1%”, but in part numbers I do sometimes see some “scientific” notation: 1R000 would probably be a 0.1% part. Also, small values are generally shown as a fraction of an ohm: 0R47, 0R001. I don’t know what the standard says about that: it’s been 25 years since I was at school.
That’s been my experience, too. I used to hear it a lot more often, but G was slangy, and kinda gangster-ish, like calling a $100 bill a C-note. You wouldn’t type it out in a newspaper article, for example, but if someone said they owed 3 G’s to someone, you knew what they meant. It was about as slangy as using the word “large”, which in my experience was also usually gangster-style talk. Wikipedia says that large is used in banking. As I don’t work in the banking industry, I have no idea if that is true or not.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
$1000 notes are occasionally referred to as “large” in banking (“twenty large” being $20,000, etc.) In slang, a thousand dollars may also be referred to as a “grand,” “G”, “K” (as in kilo), or a “stack.” (usage: “The repairs to my car cost me a couple grand.” Or: “The repairs to my car cost me a couple/couple of stacks.”)
[/QUOTE]
I’ve never personally heard the word “stack” used in that way.
To echo what most of the posters have said, I am quite familiar with “G,” but it is always used in the plural. You could say “He pulls in 100K a year” or “He pulls in 100 Gs a year,” but I can’t recall ever hearing “He pulls in 100G a year.” It does, however, feel to me like the “100 Gs” usage has declined in popularity, being replaced by “100K.” My recollection is, growing up, that “Gs” was the more common usage in my neighborhood. I’ve also heard the aforementioned “stack” in reference to a thousand dollars, but I don’t remember that term being very common.