If you do use these abbreviations, be sure to clearly define them in the text. In the modern world, we regularly encounter the words million and billion, and businesses, governments, astronomers and journalists often think in the millions, billions or even trillions. However, the word million has been around in English only since the late fourteenth century. The word billion was not introduced in the French language until the fifteenth century and didn’t find its way into English until the end of the seventeenth century, which is fairly late in the history of counting. What words were used before this time to talk about large numbers? This article looks at how we started using million and billion and how the meaning of billion has changed.

• If 1,000 multiplied by 1,000 equals 1,000,000, and 1,000 equals M, then we can use the abbreviations to create calculations.
• So if we stay consistent with the Greek abbreviations, then billion would be shown as a letter G (Giga).
• “M” is the official abbreviation used whenever a million units of something are requested.
• To summarize, our modern numerical system is the same as the Hindu-Arabic numerical system.

Scientific notation represents numbers in powers of ten, so that 650 billion can be written as 650 × 109 or as 6.50 × 1011. In finance and accounting, MM (or lowercase “mm”) denotes that the units of figures presented are in millions. Thus, what does mm mean MM is the same as writing “M multiplied by M,” which is equal to “1,000 times 1,000”, which equals 1,000,000 (one million). This guide will explore how the notation should be used, as well as alternative symbols that are used in practice.

Millimeter to Meter Conversion Table

You’ll find that it’s mainly used in the energy sector, but it otherwise doesn’t get recognized. Compare values between unit Million with other Number calculation units. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution.

I have worked in equity markets for 20 years and poor abbreviations drive me crazy. Regretfully, until the USA goes metric there’s going to continue to be problem with this. Stack Exchange https://www.bookstime.com/articles/what-are-t-accounts network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

How was the mm abbreviation created?

Some abbreviations for million options may surprise you, as is also true for some of the other large number abbreviations. In fact, the largest number with a single-word name in ancient Greek was 10,000. From myrias we get the English word myriad meaning “an extremely large number or amount”.

“M” is the only acceptable abbreviation to use for “million” in UK English. You’ll find that a lot of UK native speakers won’t even know what “mm” stands for (outside of the “millimeter” measurement that is abbreviated to “mm”). While the fields of accounting, banking and finance have adopted the Roman tradition, other fields such as computer programming and the high-tech industry have adopted Greek-influenced abbreviations. As we mix our traditions, it sometimes becomes difficult to know what someone intends to convey expressing thousands or millions in an abbreviation. Agents will also commonly see us communicate M as thousands when we quote surety rates or agent commissions.

Correct Abbreviation for “Million” in The UK

When preparing financial statements, accountants will typically write a note at the top of the income statement or the balance sheet saying, “All figures are expressed in millions of U.S. dollars,” for example. If the company sells 26,000 units, the accountant can record that as 26M units. If net income runs to $6,500,000, it goes on the books as $6.5MM.

The most commonly seen short forms for thousand, million, billion and trillion in North America and the United Kingdom, respectively, are outlined in the table below. For those who were taught numbers before the 1970s, the answer to this question may well have been different depending on where you received your schooling. While it is accepted in English today that one billion equals 109, it is important to be aware, especially when reading older texts, that in the United Kingdom billion hasn’t always meant 109. Until the 1970s, when the United Kingdom officially adopted the American definition of billion, this word represented 1012 in British English. Rather than use the barred M, however, accounting went with MM as an abbreviation for a million.

The barred M was necessary because the Romans didn’t use zero, and they didn’t like using more than three identical letters in a row. If you can’t go above three M’s in a row, you can’t get to 4,000, which would be MMMM. In internet record keeping, for instance, CPM is the cost per thousand impressions of an internet ad.

• You might come across “mm” in scientific or engineering fields, where different values are required, and they can reach well into the millions as a unit.
• In fact, the largest number with a single-word name in ancient Greek was 10,000.
• As we mix our traditions, it sometimes becomes difficult to know what someone intends to convey expressing thousands or millions in an abbreviation.
• The ancients also had the “myriad myriad” (10,000 × 10,000) or one hundred million.
• If the company sells 26,000 units, the accountant can record that as 26M units.
• A small-scale clothes manufacturing company, Weavers & Co., records the following data in its income statement.

For example, 1MM equals 1 million, $34MM equals $34 million and so on. The meaning of the word “million” is common to the short scale and long scale numbering systems, unlike the larger numbers, which have different names in the two systems. I have seen million, billion, and trillion abbreviated as M, B, and T respectively.

Example of MM in financial statements

Frequently, in finance and accounting settings now, an analyst will use k to denote thousands and a capitalized M to denote millions. The Latin numeral MM is frequently used to designate that the units used in presenting information (financial and non-financial) are in millions. The example below shows how figures can be portrayed in millions. Territory includes Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Hawaii, Alaska, California, and Utah. Darrel has over 30 years of proven success and is skilled in developing relationships with internal and external stakeholders to drive superior business results. Whether the topic is significant sums of money or a massive quantity of something, it’s common to use abbreviations when writing out large numbers in text.

For example, M in Roman numerals stands for one thousand, while a bar above the M denotes a million. Within finance and accounting, we often find something quite different. For example, a thousand is often abbreviated as (M), a million is abbreviated as (MM), and a billion is abbreviated as (BN) or (MMM). “mm” is often left uncapitalized (though there are no specific rules that state which way it should be written). It is Latin for multiplying one “thousand” by itself to create the “million” number. “mm” (which is usually kept in the lower case) is an old-fashioned abbreviation that doesn’t see much common usage.