Strictly speaking, speaking of 1000s of people would only be correct if there are groups of 1000 people.
Like speaking of pairs of people. I.E. sets of two.
1000s would then be sets of 1000
But I can guarantee you that this is not what they meant when they wrote “1000s”…
I think he means this:
5c10
5$10
Which symbol is associated with which number?
10$ “About 15,300,000 results (0.48 seconds)”
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 150 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
10$ “About 15,600,000 results (0.43 seconds)”
"Page 39 of 390 results (1.17 seconds) "
I did get that far. I just don’t understand the logic afterwards. Without other reference points, to me, neither symbol is associated more with the preceding or the following number. I don’t understand what “" is "big" and "¢" is small has to do with it. Are we talking size of the symbols themselves? That's arbitrary. "” is written quite small often, and “¢” can be written quite large. And, even so, what does size have to do with whether the symbol follows or precedes the number? I don’t get the explanation at all.
Brossard cites page after page of historical examples and variations, including “125 fr. 75” (also 1[sup]f[/sup]15 and similar), 2[sup]m[/sup],006, 4[sup]kg[/sup],415, but a quick glance does not reveal anything like “5c10” where the abbreviation is of the fractional unit.
Ah. I see. I don’t know either. Size shouldn’t matter. But placing the dollar sign before, and the cent symbol after has been the common style forever.
I used to correct my kids text messages all the time for 10$.
They get it now. But I see it all the time in the wild.
The best answer I can dig up to the “cents” vs “dollars” question is that it’s simply convention in English. The currency symbol () comes first, but "¢" isn't really a currency symbol in the same sense is (the currency is the US dollar, and cents are just parts of the currency), so that’s why they come at the end, to differentiate the currency symbol from merely a symbolic shortcut for the word “¢” or something like that. (Perhaps analogizing “¢” to “#” like how 30# means “thirty pounds” or something like that.) That’s just one possible explanation, though I don’t see any definitive reasoning for how the convention came about.
However, in other countries it is not unusual to put the currency marker after the number (see how in Quebec, which also uses dollars, you will see prices with the dollar sign after the number. like in this ad to subscribe to a newspaper. Or the Euro symbol which also comes after the number. Looks like both these have already been mentioned.)
So, it’s just convention in the end.
Rather, the Euro symbol comes after the number in most non-English styles.
As long as we’re at it I don’t care for 10+ to mean “over 10” as in “10+ years of experience” on a resume.
Was one of those supposed to be $10?
Here’s what I get, still:
With quotes in google (otherwise you get anything with 10 in it for the 10$ search):
“10$” About 15,300,000 results (0.58 seconds)
“$10” About 475,000,000 results (0.52 seconds)
Bing doesn’t want to search for just 10$, even with quotes, and duckduckgo doesn’t give me a number of results.
I tried it with £ sign (£10 is the standard in the UK). Oddly though Google gave me exactly the same figure for £ before and after even when I enclosed both in inverted commas. Something wrong there but my google-fu is not powerful enough to know what.
Ooh, that’s bizarre. I get the same result, £10 and 10£ gives the same results as for just 10. And even weirder that same doesn’t apply to ₤. This is an anti Brit conspiracy! Wait, let me check the euro symbol!
Yup, the Euro sign works perfectly. This is obviously anti-brit bias!
Look like currency searches are treated differently by google from other “punctuation”, this includes ₱ that I just tested, but somehow the £ only halfway works that way.
See, I just read that as “ten plus” and not “over ten.” Perhaps it’s because of this notation that it sounds perfectly colloquial to me, but it’s not a usage that jars. I’ve certainly heard phrases like “ten plus years of experience” in spoken usage and not batted an eye. If you want to be more traditional, just think of the “+” as “and over” so “10+” is “10 and over.”
Yes, Google algorithms do not do true “exact match” searches. Back in ye olden days of altavista, I do remember if you placed anything between quotes/inverted commas, it would force a true exact string search (or at least that is my memory.) Google may or may not have worked this way once upon a time, but I cannot personally remember when it was that literal. It usually works with letters and spaces, I believe, but once you get beyond that, I’m not sure how the algorithm works. For example, I just searched “1.2,3”. Note the decimal point and then the comma. Searched in quotes, Google just returns all the “1.2.3” results and does not differentiate between that and “1.2,3”. (I’m straying from US style to put periods inside quotes for obvious reasons there.)
No, but they do in Quebec and tags always say things like 2,99$ (note the comma instead of the period). Anything else is probably illegal signage. You get used to it.
In Switzerland, they say 2Fr99 I think and in France they use euros.
No, but they do in Quebec and tags always say things like 2,99$ (note the comma instead of the period). Anything else is probably illegal signage. You get used to it.
In Switzerland, they say 2Fr99 I think and in France they use euros.
Are you sure? I want to say Fr. 2,99
The strange thing though is that apparently the dollar sign and several other currency signs are specially programmed in so that “10" and "10” give exact matches. But that doesn’t apply for £.
Go AltaVista! Go Digital Equipment Vax!
With its Booleans, and Netscape’s, and probably Google’s back then in “pre-sophisticated” days, I seem to remember any character (uniquely non present in the string) could be used as a delimiter.
Even today, Google’s processing you lament here should not be held against it. Google supplies a logical AND anytime it recognizes an ASCII space. But not an OR.
Not sure if the other delimiters around (most commonly in my experience the vertical bar | ) are recognized. Never saw a comma in anything but…well, English.