Learn English – Money abbreviations

abbreviationsreading-aloud

I can't find in Google any list of the money abbreviations used by English people.

I need to know how to continue this list:

  • 1,000 = K

  • 1,000,000 = M (or KK for odd speaking)

What is the next, maybe "B" of billion and also "KKK" for odd speaking?

What are the abbreviations for the other long known numbers?

Best Answer

Practice varies from publisher to publisher, but these are common abbreviations:

  • K for thousands of dollars, Euros, etc. is a relatively recent adoption from computing and is not yet much used in formal contexts.
  • The usual abbreviations for million and billion are M (or m) and B (or b); you may also encounter Mn (mn) and Bn (bn), particularly with commodities other than money. Be careful of your audience, however; the US employs the 'short scale', in which each successive term represents one thousand times the previous term, and the UK has officially been on the short scale for a generation; but many other countries employ the 'long scale', in which each term after a million represents one million times the previous term.
  • I have seen T, Tr, tr, Tn and tn for trillion. I advise the forms with r rather than n, since tn may be read as tons or tonnes.
  • Money quantities of larger orders of magnitude are so rarely encountered that I have never seen an abbreviation for quadrillion.
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