8 ms·

What I'd like to know more is why it goes before the quantity and not after. Nobody writes "it weighs lb. 10" or "it's m 20 long". Or even "I had %20 of it".

What I'd like to know more is why it goes before the quantity and not after. Nobody writes "it weighs lb. 10" or "it's m 20 long". Or even "I had %20 of it". Subconsciously I always read "$10" as "dollar ten". It drives me a little crazy.

dorfsmay 12y ago
I came to the comment section exactly for this. I've fought with my kids and showed them unit algebra (5$/day for 3 days:(53)($day/day) = 15$) to explain why all units need to be behind the numbers. They got it, but then got in trouble in school (in Canada). Dollar sign HAS to be in front - Why? Because that's how it's done.
- aroberge 12y ago
  In French schools in Canada, the proper notation (e.g. 5$) is used.
  - douche 12y ago
    Yet not in listed prices at stores or restaurants, at least so far as I have ever experienced in Quebec.
blackobelisk 12y ago
sometimes I actually format it "10$" and it weirds people out. makes sense to me though.
- acadien 12y ago
  It really makes no sense, every other unit follows the number but with money it goes before. The temperature outside is F10, that package weights lbs14, the football is at psi1.8.
  - yitchelle 12y ago
    In Europe, it is acceptable to put the € symbol after the digits as in 10,67€. Just putting in a contrast here..
    - hk__2 12y ago
      This is how we write it in French (3.14€ instead of €3.14).
    - gambiting 12y ago
      For Polish currency you also put the "zł" symbol after the price(50zł). Absolutely never ever before the price.
    - DangerousPie 12y ago
      "Acceptable" is not really the right word here - in most (all?) EUR countries it is actually the norm.
      - barrystaes 12y ago
        Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Granted in advertisements and billboards you'll often see the € sign suffixed in small, or just left out entirely, but i dont base my norm on advertisements. When suffexed, i mostly see "EUR" or "EURO" used instead of the € symbol: 123,40 EUR.
        masklinn 12y ago
        > Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK) By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_the_euro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th... for a reasonably complete table.
- xxxyy 12y ago
  Don't mean to offend anyone, but there are more issues with units in the US ;) [0] http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-use-the-metric-system/ http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-us...
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Your list of backwaters is cute, if the US used only metric they would be even more dominating of the entire planet, which I doubt you would like.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
libria 12y ago
Infuriatingly, we write 10¢ in the "right" order.
DanBC 12y ago
Especially since in American you'd write 10c, and not c10. There's a stack exchange comment saying it's harder to forge $20 to $320 than it is to forge 20$ to 320$. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-is-the-difference-between-20-and-20 http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-is-the... http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013/why-is-the-unit-of-measure-placed-before-the-value-for-currencies-are-there-oth http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013/why-is-the-... I'd like to know why we do it too. I mean, I know "just because" but I'd like to know how it started.
- jmccree 12y ago
  From a quick google image search, it appears that at least some EU checks also follow the format of putting the currency symbol before the numerical amount. It makes sense on the face of things that $200.00 is harder to alter than 200.00$ .
  - kleiba 12y ago
    that $200.00 is harder to alter Luckily, though, it is common to use commas to separate groups of three digits: $200,000.00 But this means a change of a factor 1000 which might be less useful than the original 20$ -> 320$ example.
    - spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
      That depends on locale other countrys do not use commas as separators in the same way
  - reacweb 12y ago
    As a european, my feeling is that we are more and more copying american way of using $ when we use €.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- stephentmcm 12y ago
caf 12y ago
Years are another one like dollars, though: C20 is sometimes used for "20th Century" and it's not uncommon to see a year written as AD2015.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  Of course "AD" is Latin, and the AD2015 order is probably appropriate for Latin. I wonder if $20 comes from the appropriate order for Spanish, now that I know the $ symbol comes from Spanish!
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Of course "AD" is Latin, and the AD2015 order is probably appropriate for Latin. It'd be just as appropriate if Anno Domini was translated into English.
    - narag 12y ago
      Funny: when movies in English are dubbed to Spanish, the Latin expression is expanded and translated also, placed before the number: "era el año del Señor 1212 cuando...". It sounds good as if it were an archaism (the normal way of speaking is "1212 después de cristo" or 1212 DC).
  - caf 12y ago
    My guess is that it comes from the order typically used for ledgers, which is Description followed by Quantity. So you might have a ship's manifest with entries like: | sacks of barley | 130 | | kegs of wine | 12 | | pesos de ocha | 2,800 | So the abbreviation Ps starts out on the left-hand-side too.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    Nope. In Latin languages the number comes before the period (2015 DC). That was a hard detail of English to learn... But in about any language the currency symbol comes before the number.
blahedo 12y ago
I worked for a summer in the text-to-speech lab at Motorola and remember banging my head on this problem---especially because something like "$2 million" or even "$2m" has to get rewritten for the speech engine. It's like a middle-endian notation.
ScottBurson 12y ago
If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars, whatever that is. Years ago an acquaintance of mine told me about a bad experience he had had with some cell company's customer service. It seems that the contract he had received had said that he would be charged for data service at the rate of ".02¢/kilobyte". (This was in the very early days of cellular data, so prices weren't well established, and I'm probably not remembering the correct number, but as you'll see, that's not the point.) When the bill came, he found that he was in fact charged 2¢/kB -- 100 times more than he expected. He called to complain, but was unable to communicate to the customer service agent that, correctly read, .02¢ = $.0002. The agent apparently looked at the notation ".02¢" and read it as "$.02". One can understand the psychology of this. The notation ".02¢" contains two indications that the value 2 is to be multiplied by 1/100: one is given by the position of the decimal point, and the other by the use of the cent sign instead of the dollar sign. But if you read those two indications as redundant rather than independent, you get the interpretation used by the agent (and apparently also by the person who wrote the contract). So I would suggest that the "$10 dollars" thing is not as benign as it appears. Mathematical notation is not supposed to have redundancies in it, and we should not get used to seeing them there -- particularly when money is involved.
- grkvlt 12y ago
  I think your friend was actually trying to tell you about this story [1] not something that actually happened to them. [1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-kno...
  - whichfawkes 12y ago
    Maybe his acquaintance has a blog?
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    Possibly. As I recall, he was pretty upset about it, which seems to suggest it happened to him -- but it was a long time ago, and we all know memory is a funny thing.
jzwinck 12y ago
The British put their currency symbol in front as well. Malaysians write theirs like "RM8"; RM being their local currency symbol despite the ISO one being MYR (this happens because ISO puts the country first but many countries would write it out the other way around). A bunch of other countries don't write any symbol at all, only the number. Some, like Indonesia, also have an implied thousands (000) at the end, since their base currency unit is very small. So you may see "8" but it means "8000 IDR."
- FreeFull 12y ago
  For another example of a currency where the symbol does go on the right end, there is the Polish currency (złoty). For example, "5,99 zł" (although often the zł will be skipped)
mkramlich 12y ago
I hear you. but do what I and some others are doing. wherever you can get away with it put the $ after, as in "10$". let's be the change we wish to see in the world. I also try to express dates in sort-friendly format wherever I can, like "2015 Feb 7" (or 20150207 if computer must parse or align, etc). I also express measurements in metric/SI wherever I can. I also never bought into this whole "put TL;DR at the end" anti-pattern I see some folks doing (assume young) when I can continue to have a "summary: foo" at the beginning, which is clearly better in two particular ways. one could argue that "10 USD" is even better overall, with the negative of requing two extra chars.
- gnopgnip 12y ago
  Wouldn't this just take even longer to pass information because you are not using the expected format?
  - mkramlich 12y ago
    note my choice of words "wherever you can get away with it" :-) because I do take those situations into account. if it would cause a problem with others I don't do it. in my own notes or when dealing with others whose brains I know can handle it, I do.

dorfsmay 12y ago

I came to the comment section exactly for this. I've fought with my kids and showed them unit algebra (5$/day for 3 days:(53)($day/day) = 15$) to explain why all units need to be behind the numbers. They got it, but then got in trouble in school (in Canada). Dollar sign HAS to be in front - Why? Because that's how it's done.

aroberge 12y ago
In French schools in Canada, the proper notation (e.g. 5$) is used.
- douche 12y ago
  Yet not in listed prices at stores or restaurants, at least so far as I have ever experienced in Quebec.

blackobelisk 12y ago

sometimes I actually format it "10$" and it weirds people out. makes sense to me though.

acadien 12y ago
It really makes no sense, every other unit follows the number but with money it goes before. The temperature outside is F10, that package weights lbs14, the football is at psi1.8.
- yitchelle 12y ago
  In Europe, it is acceptable to put the € symbol after the digits as in 10,67€. Just putting in a contrast here..
  - hk__2 12y ago
    This is how we write it in French (3.14€ instead of €3.14).
  - gambiting 12y ago
    For Polish currency you also put the "zł" symbol after the price(50zł). Absolutely never ever before the price.
  - DangerousPie 12y ago
    "Acceptable" is not really the right word here - in most (all?) EUR countries it is actually the norm.
    - barrystaes 12y ago
      Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Granted in advertisements and billboards you'll often see the € sign suffixed in small, or just left out entirely, but i dont base my norm on advertisements. When suffexed, i mostly see "EUR" or "EURO" used instead of the € symbol: 123,40 EUR.
      - masklinn 12y ago
        > Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK) By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_the_euro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th... for a reasonably complete table.
xxxyy 12y ago
Don't mean to offend anyone, but there are more issues with units in the US ;) [0] http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-use-the-metric-system/ http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-us...
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Your list of backwaters is cute, if the US used only metric they would be even more dominating of the entire planet, which I doubt you would like.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]

libria 12y ago

Infuriatingly, we write 10¢ in the "right" order.

DanBC 12y ago

Especially since in American you'd write 10c, and not c10. There's a stack exchange comment saying it's harder to forge $20 to $320 than it is to forge 20$ to 320$. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-is-the-difference-between-20-and-20 http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-is-the... http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013/why-is-the-unit-of-measure-placed-before-the-value-for-currencies-are-there-oth http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/34013/why-is-the-... I'd like to know why we do it too. I mean, I know "just because" but I'd like to know how it started.

jmccree 12y ago
From a quick google image search, it appears that at least some EU checks also follow the format of putting the currency symbol before the numerical amount. It makes sense on the face of things that $200.00 is harder to alter than 200.00$ .
- kleiba 12y ago
  that $200.00 is harder to alter Luckily, though, it is common to use commas to separate groups of three digits: $200,000.00 But this means a change of a factor 1000 which might be less useful than the original 20$ -> 320$ example.
  - spacecowboy_lon 12y ago
    That depends on locale other countrys do not use commas as separators in the same way
- reacweb 12y ago
  As a european, my feeling is that we are more and more copying american way of using $ when we use €.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
stephentmcm 12y ago

caf 12y ago

Years are another one like dollars, though: C20 is sometimes used for "20th Century" and it's not uncommon to see a year written as AD2015.

jrochkind1 12y ago
Of course "AD" is Latin, and the AD2015 order is probably appropriate for Latin. I wonder if $20 comes from the appropriate order for Spanish, now that I know the $ symbol comes from Spanish!
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Of course "AD" is Latin, and the AD2015 order is probably appropriate for Latin. It'd be just as appropriate if Anno Domini was translated into English.
  - narag 12y ago
    Funny: when movies in English are dubbed to Spanish, the Latin expression is expanded and translated also, placed before the number: "era el año del Señor 1212 cuando...". It sounds good as if it were an archaism (the normal way of speaking is "1212 después de cristo" or 1212 DC).
- caf 12y ago
  My guess is that it comes from the order typically used for ledgers, which is Description followed by Quantity. So you might have a ship's manifest with entries like: | sacks of barley | 130 | | kegs of wine | 12 | | pesos de ocha | 2,800 | So the abbreviation Ps starts out on the left-hand-side too.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Nope. In Latin languages the number comes before the period (2015 DC). That was a hard detail of English to learn... But in about any language the currency symbol comes before the number.

blahedo 12y ago

I worked for a summer in the text-to-speech lab at Motorola and remember banging my head on this problem---especially because something like "$2 million" or even "$2m" has to get rewritten for the speech engine. It's like a middle-endian notation.

ScottBurson 12y ago

If you want to amuse yourself, count the times you see people write things like "$10 dollars". It's quite common. Technically it should mean 10 square dollars, whatever that is. Years ago an acquaintance of mine told me about a bad experience he had had with some cell company's customer service. It seems that the contract he had received had said that he would be charged for data service at the rate of ".02¢/kilobyte". (This was in the very early days of cellular data, so prices weren't well established, and I'm probably not remembering the correct number, but as you'll see, that's not the point.) When the bill came, he found that he was in fact charged 2¢/kB -- 100 times more than he expected. He called to complain, but was unable to communicate to the customer service agent that, correctly read, .02¢ = $.0002. The agent apparently looked at the notation ".02¢" and read it as "$.02". One can understand the psychology of this. The notation ".02¢" contains two indications that the value 2 is to be multiplied by 1/100: one is given by the position of the decimal point, and the other by the use of the cent sign instead of the dollar sign. But if you read those two indications as redundant rather than independent, you get the interpretation used by the agent (and apparently also by the person who wrote the contract). So I would suggest that the "$10 dollars" thing is not as benign as it appears. Mathematical notation is not supposed to have redundancies in it, and we should not get used to seeing them there -- particularly when money is involved.

grkvlt 12y ago
I think your friend was actually trying to tell you about this story [1] not something that actually happened to them. [1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html http://verizonmath.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-kno...
- whichfawkes 12y ago
  Maybe his acquaintance has a blog?
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  Possibly. As I recall, he was pretty upset about it, which seems to suggest it happened to him -- but it was a long time ago, and we all know memory is a funny thing.

jzwinck 12y ago

The British put their currency symbol in front as well. Malaysians write theirs like "RM8"; RM being their local currency symbol despite the ISO one being MYR (this happens because ISO puts the country first but many countries would write it out the other way around). A bunch of other countries don't write any symbol at all, only the number. Some, like Indonesia, also have an implied thousands (000) at the end, since their base currency unit is very small. So you may see "8" but it means "8000 IDR."

FreeFull 12y ago
For another example of a currency where the symbol does go on the right end, there is the Polish currency (złoty). For example, "5,99 zł" (although often the zł will be skipped)

mkramlich 12y ago

I hear you. but do what I and some others are doing. wherever you can get away with it put the $ after, as in "10$". let's be the change we wish to see in the world. I also try to express dates in sort-friendly format wherever I can, like "2015 Feb 7" (or 20150207 if computer must parse or align, etc). I also express measurements in metric/SI wherever I can. I also never bought into this whole "put TL;DR at the end" anti-pattern I see some folks doing (assume young) when I can continue to have a "summary: foo" at the beginning, which is clearly better in two particular ways. one could argue that "10 USD" is even better overall, with the negative of requing two extra chars.

gnopgnip 12y ago
Wouldn't this just take even longer to pass information because you are not using the expected format?
- mkramlich 12y ago
  note my choice of words "wherever you can get away with it" :-) because I do take those situations into account. if it would cause a problem with others I don't do it. in my own notes or when dealing with others whose brains I know can handle it, I do.