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And the problem at looking at it from an etymological viewpoint, you eliminate the J alright, but there's no particular reason to eliminate the K from words of English origin.
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old hand
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old hand
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> but there's no particular reason to eliminate the K from words of English origin.
Well no, but there's a rationlisation for eliminating them in the this case, right? Our numbers aren't really very native - as symbols, written or otherwise. As for leaving out zero/zilch/cipher an' what not... [shrug]
So the final list you want is .... J, K, & Z? Or wot, Mav?
- zero patience
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Carpal Tunnel
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> J, K, & Z
Looks a good answer to me, BY.
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J, K, & Z
JKooZ - easy to remember, Maverick. :)
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addict
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Sorry for delay, guys, I've been offline for a while... FF, I for one am going to admit I had never heard of any of your 'illions' before this. Hence their non-inclusion in my process. I went away and looked them up in my Shorter Oxford (1969, inherited from grandparents) Octillion eighth power of a million, denoted by 1 followed by 48 ciphers. (in US, following later French usage, the ninth power of a thousand, denoted by one and 27 ciphers) quintillion a) in Britain, the fifth power of a million (1 followed by thirty ciphers) b) in US (as in France) the cube of a million (1 followed by 18 ciphers) septillion the seventh power of a million, denoted by one followed by 32 ciphers. In American (following the later French use) the eighth power of a thousand, denoted by 1 followed by 24 ciphers. This leads me to the following thoughts: - just what is the logic behind the US/French way of assigning values to these words??? - in modern 'international' English, do these words have one standard accepted definition? Are they in fact used? - (insert desperately-justifying-own-lack-of-knowledge-and-hence-not-using-them-in-proof emoticon here  ) given obscurity/dual definitions, do they really qualify as 'officially recognised'? - how bizarrely different the wording is of entries in the same dictionary for such closely related words!
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Bravo belli, that's getting there. So the final list of letters not found in the [bold]Latin-rooted[/bold] names is...Um, can I quote 'twenty' and 'hundred' as deriving from Old English rather than Latin? Let alone four, five, ten, eleven, twelve... I'm pretty sure that in my 6 (?) years of Latin at school I never came across a word that included a 'w', yet on the basis of 'twenty' it needs to be eliminated. Mav, I am really enjoying this mental exercise, but I think you should define your set of numbers!!!! 'Officially recognised' (whatever that may mean) or 'Latin-rooted'? 
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"just what is the logic behind the US/French way of assigning values to these words???"
I don't know that there is a logic. I first learned that there was a difference in high school, though I did not know which one had prior usage. Could be that we just plagiarized the French usage. I can guess that they figure that it was just logical to say that after a billion should come a trillion, quadrillion, and so on.
"- in modern 'international' English, do these words have one standard accepted definition? Are they in fact used?"
I heard them used a few times in high school and maybe middle school. For those of us who actually use numbers that big - and I have used numbers of that size and vastly larger for real problems - with a few exceptions, it is more common to use scientific notation, keeping only a few digits of precision. For example to express the constant known as the permittivity of free space, we would write 8.852 e-12, pronounced either as "eight point eight five two EE minus twelve" or as "eight point eight five two times ten to the minus twelve." The speed of light in a vacuum would be 3e8 m/s, or "three EE eight meters per second."
"- (insert desperately-justifying-own-lack-of-knowledge-and-hence-not-using-them-in-proof emoticon here ) given obscurity/dual definitions, do they really qualify as 'officially recognised'?"
I never thought about it.
"- how bizarrely different the wording is of entries in the same dictionary for such closely related words!"
indeed!
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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just what is the logic behind the US/French way of assigning values to these words???I was taught that the US way is to increase the name by one rank for every three zeros and the British way is for every six zeros. Thus 1,000 is one thousand US vs one thousand British
1,000,000 is one million vs one million
1,000,000,000 is one billion vs one thousand million
(or "one milliard")
1,000,000,000,000 is one trillion vs one billion
(or "one million million")
10E15 is one quadrillion vs one thousand billion
10E18 is one quintillion vs one trillion
10E21 is one sextillion vs one thousand trillion
10E24 is one septillion vs one quadrillion
etc. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
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Pooh-Bah
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I'll never earn that much so I never looked past the thousand level. [sigh]
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> Old English rather than Latin?
Another bloody troublemaker! These Australians, really.... ;)
I'll stand by my original question - yes, I reckon the *illions are officailly recognised (personally I'd say the US verzion now rules), yes I know the lower numbers have the OE roots, but then to work it out one needed to either iterate almost endlessly or figure the fact that larger numbers came from Latin and so would not contain...
and yes, wofa, you've got what I was taught too.
hah, think I'll go and lie down now :)
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