this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2022
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Non ten-exponent numbers is way more common than you think.
In India, you get the lakh (hundred thousand or 1,00,000), and the crore (ten million or 1,00,00,000), and so on.
In Chinese, you have one, ten, hundred, thousand. Then wan (ten thousand), ten wan (hundred thousand), hundred wan (million), thousand wan (ten million). Then, you don't get wan wan (hundred million), you get a new word, yi, then ten yi, hundred yi, so on until you get another new word for yi yi, and so on. Basically, the system is that you can multiply any magnitude word by any magnitude word smaller than it, but once you get to what would have been the magnitude word multiplied by itself, it's time for a new word. Actually a pretty cool system, coming from a Chinese speaker, but it means it takes me a minute to translate between Chinese and English numbers.