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Five grand would be five thousand dollars.
How did grand come to be a monetary designation?
And:
Do we have any comparable words for a hundred thousand, a million, and higher?
Since we're iced in here at the farm, we're watching a gangster movie and one of the gangsters was talking about the number of grands they owed another gangster.
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I'm curious, too. I think the G in "grand" comes from the G in, giga, maybe? I'm sure one of the scholars here will fill us in. Meanwhile, I'm glad you haven't lost power. I complain about the snow here, but ice storms are much, much worse...
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I don't know about comparable words for higher values, but if you go lower, you get 'a pony' meaning £25- and 'a ton' meaning £100- (or 100mph as in 'doing over the ton')
Also, my Collins dictionary suggests that grand comes from the Latin 'grandis' and dates back to the C16.
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Any minute now...the lights are beginning to flicker...we'll be without power, but do have a generator.
I checked AHD and MW online, but only read about grand as a slang term and saw nothing about etymology.
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from the G in, giga
Since giga means billion and a grand isn't even a million pennies (100,000, to be precise) I wouldn't think so. I think it dates back to a time when $1000 was a grand amount of money.
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OK. And what does the K come from to mean thousand? kilo?
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"I think it dates back to a time when $1000 was a grand amount of money."
I've also heard the word "large" used in this context, as in "I'm into him for ten large." I wonder which came first.
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K = kilo
Yup
Interesting (to me) sidenote. I don't know if I've mentioned this previously, here it is again anyway.
Most people probably know that K=1024 (and not 1000) to computerists.
1 Kilobyte = 1 KB = 1024 Bytes 1 Megabyte = 1 MB = 1024*1024 Bytes 1 Gigabyte = 1 GB = 1024*1024*1024 Bytes
However, among communications engineers (many of whom are probably also computer programmers), K equals 1000 again. 1 Kb/s = one kilobit per second, which can lead to a bit of, ahem, miscommunication at times. I didn't actually catch onto this for a long time until I finally took a formal class in networking (from a pretty well-known guy in the field, and this fact was in his class notes). I missed a lot of stuff when I studied this on my own, and had done a lot more reading. I really should have taken the class sooner. Since I figured this out, I've seen several books get it wrong (assuming my prof's notes were correct - what can I say? I trust him).
k
---- Note the small b is for bit and the big B is for byte
Years ago there wasn't a clear standard for what word size was, so a DEC 10 (a 36 bit computer), one could actually define one's byte sizes. And a PDP-8 (also manufactured by DEC and for a long time the most popular mini-computer in the world) had 12 bit words.
1 Byte = 8b 1/2 Word = 2B = 16b 1 Full Word = 4B = 32b 1 Double Word = 8B = 64b
There was also a term for 4 bits, but I haven't heard it used for at least a decade. Does anyone know or care to guess what that term is?
k
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care to guess what that term is?
I know so I ain' guessing.
Don' nobody peek...
nybble (Spellings may vary; check local geeks)
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