3 ms·
2 dollar millimeters? Is this "mm" some odd Americanism?
by flog 16y ago
2 dollar millimeters? Is this "mm" some odd Americanism?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ars 16y agoNo. It's a financial thing. It looks odd to Americans too. And BTW, you could have googled that yourself in two seconds.
- jaltucher 16y agoI used to just say "2M" for $2 million but an editor I had once at thestreet.com said you have to do "$2mm". I don't know whats right worldwide.
- _delirium 16y agoIn general-audience journalism, $2M or $2m is a lot more common, I believe, though $2mm / $2MM is also used, but less frequently. In finance-industry news it seems to be the opposite. Compare: http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22%242m%22 http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&... vs. http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22%242mm%22 http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...
- eli 16y agoWell, you would never say "$2M" to mean $2,000, so either one works and it's really just a matter of house style.
- samatman 16y agoIf you are ordering a manufactured good, however, 2M definitely means 2000. There was some hilarity in ordering the first round of MakerBeam parts arising from this; we thought we were going to be getting 2 meter long beams, for a panicked minute.
- flog 16y agoYeah thanks. I apologise for taking up some of your pixels.
- adamt 16y agoMM is widely used within the finance industry to mean million(s). It comes from Latin "Mille" meaning "thousand", so MM is a "thousand thousands" which equals one million.
- cabalamat 16y ago"MM" is even worse than "mm", because "M" is the international standard abbreviation for 10^6, so MM would by extension mean 10^12.
- ars 16y agoExcept it doesn't. The metric system doesn't work that way. M is not the international standard abbreviation for 10^6. M is the SI system for 10^6, which is not the same thing - SI has some extra rules. If you write MM you are clearly not using SI (since it makes no sense in SI), so it's not that hard to figure out. M has meant 1000 for a lot longer than it's meant 10^6. And BTW, lowercase m means milli, so by your logic mm should mean 1/1000000 - so tell me again why MM is worse?
- roel_v 16y agoI meant to downvote but misclicked, so I'll just comment ars's comment above is to the best of my knowledge much more accurate than yours.
- cturner 16y agoIt might be interesting to you - I played with the representation of that when I posted, but couldn't find anything that was both brief and which looked satisfying so I settled on the same as the original article.