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You were quick with your reply and I actually added a paragraph to my comment since. Basically I wasn't able to find any English equivalent to the system of na

You were quick with your reply and I actually added a paragraph to my comment since. Basically I wasn't able to find any English equivalent to the system of naming conventions we use to denote "units" in the German language. Most of the Wikipedia articles dealing with those things in German have no equivalent English article, or the english version bears no resemblance of the German version and vice-versa: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einheitenzeichen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einheitenzeichen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vors%C3%A4tze_f%C3%BCr_Ma%C3%9Feinheiten https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vors%C3%A4tze_f%C3%BCr_Ma%C3%9... My takeaway is that in English you call the result of adding a prefix to a unit still "unit", albeit it consists of a "base-unit" and a "prefix". And in your comment you just called "km" a unit again! Edit: Made both links link to German version to avoid confusion. Edit 2: What amazes me is that we managed to standardize systems of units and quantities - without standardizing the lingo surrounding them.

grzm 9y ago
> "And in your comment you just called "km" a unit again!" Are you referring to "as the difference in units (km vs miles)"? The base units are meters and miles. I use km there because that is the use (with scale) in the original context. "Unit" can have two different meanings. One is the use of measurement systems: meter vs miles. It can also refer to distinguish between the quantity and the unit in a measurement, such as "1 km" vs "1000 m": in the first case, the "1" is the quantity and "km" is the unit. In the second, "1000" is the quantity and "m" is the unit. As an aside, this sense of unit is often useful in "unit analysis" (also called "dimensional analysis"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis

grzm 9y ago

> "And in your comment you just called "km" a unit again!" Are you referring to "as the difference in units (km vs miles)"? The base units are meters and miles. I use km there because that is the use (with scale) in the original context. "Unit" can have two different meanings. One is the use of measurement systems: meter vs miles. It can also refer to distinguish between the quantity and the unit in a measurement, such as "1 km" vs "1000 m": in the first case, the "1" is the quantity and "km" is the unit. In the second, "1000" is the quantity and "m" is the unit. As an aside, this sense of unit is often useful in "unit analysis" (also called "dimensional analysis"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis