charlese wrote:Guess my added years on the planet have left me to remember the way we used to do things. If I remember correctly, 'M' is the Roman numeral for 1,000. In Logging/Milling and Forestry, MBF is the standard accepted symbol to represent 1,000 board feet.
Never did understand where the 'K' came from to represent 1,000. Must be some metric abbreviation which when applied to the measuring system used in the U.S. makes no sense! Always thought it was funny when some bureaucrat announced we would be changing to the metric system. Hectares of land ownership?
The 'M' for 1000 was(is) quite common for several commodities(natural gas is still MCF)!
The 'scientific' community has established the more rigorous set of 'multipliers'. K is an abreviation for 'Kilo' and represents 1000. It is also a carry over from previous use. Current multipliers are powers of 10 to the third.
i.e. K = 1,000 M = 1,000,000 G = 1,000,000,000 T = 1,000,000,000,000 which are 10 to the third, sixth, ninth, twelth and stand for Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera. Being defined by an international 'committee' they do not have a meaning in 'english'.
Adding to a possible confusion is the inverse powers of 10.
i.e. m = 1/1,000 µ = 1/1,000,000 n = 1/1,000,000,000 p = 1/1,000,000,000,000 and stand for milli, micro, nano, pico.
Notice the use of capital letters for 'positive' powers of ten and lower case letters for 'negative' powers of ten. Thus M = Mega and m = milli.
This 'community' is also responsible for defining the unit names for various units of measurements. Thus several years back 'Cycles Per Second' became 'Hertz'. Us old timers still slip up occasionally and refer to frequency as Kc/Mc for Kilo Hertz and Mega Hertz. CPS were named after a German scientist named Hertz.
Let's hope they leave 'RPM" alone!