A word for converting numbers to (number / 1000) + K

Question

Is there a word for the case where a number has been converted to something with a trailing ‘K’ (and possibly ‘M’ for millions, ‘B’ for billions, ...)?

Example: 250,000 changes to 250K

It will be used in a sentence like “The number is ...”, like hyphenated and capitalized are used in “The word is hyphenated” and “The character is capitalized”.

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Context: I’m programming a set of functions to deal with character and number formatting. For most of those functions, the name is simple and obvious: uppercase(), round() and trim(). Until now, I’ve used number_shorten(), which is not very descriptive, and someone reading my code would have to guess what it actually does, and therefore I’m looking for a better word to describe my function.

Answer 1

In computing circles, we often refer to numbers like 10K, 24M, 120G as being human-readable or humanized numbers. This is often in the context of byte counts, which can get notoriously unwieldy with modern storage sizes (e.g. saying I have 323416563175 bytes free on my computer), though I have seen it applied to other contexts as well.

For example, the man page for the df utility contains this description:

 -H      "Human-readable" output.  Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte,
         Terabyte and Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or less using
         base 10 for sizes.

There are entire packages designed to produce human-readable output, such as the humanize Python package.

Answer 2

I don't believe there is a specific term which applies only to numbers, but we can say such numbers are abbreviated.

For example, the University of North Carolina says of such numeric suffixes:

K: an informal abbreviation for one thousand used in expressions where the unit is understood, such as "10K run" (10 kilometers) or "700K disk" (700 kilobytes or kibibytes).

M: informal abbreviation for million in expressions where the base unit is understood, as in "500M hard drive" (500 megabytes or mebibytes).

And, if "K" and "M" are abbreviations, then numbers expressed with them have been abbreviated.

Answer 3

As you can see, none of the suggested terms, however good from the language point of view, would be self-describing and hence not suitable for an identifier, which is your use case.

As a programmer, I would stick to using a self-describing identifier, such as

convertToK()
convertToThousands()
convertToKilo()
toKilo()
toThousands()

So

The number is converted-to-thousands :)

You may read e.g. the Tim Ottinger's Rules for Variable and Class Naming, where the author recommends (among others):

• Use Intention-revealing Names
• Make Meaningful Distinctions

As you clearly stated that the domain of your word search is programming, then you probably should not ask the linguists :) Think as a client of your code - will they have to open the documentation to know what your method does or will they be able to understand it without doc?

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N.B. You should also make clear (at least in your doc) what exactly you mean by K/M/G. Based on your example

250,000 changes to 250K

it looks that you mean just plain multiplies by 1,000. Although it is technically correct, for many programmers it might be misunderstood as they might expect binary multipliers (1024, 1048576, 1073741824) instead of decimal multipliers (1000, 1000000, 1000000000).

Answer 4

250k is a shorthand representation of 250,000. In terms of code, a function could reasonably be called something like displayShorthand()

Answer 5

I suggest "denominate" for "express in units of".

denominate: (verb) to express or designate in some denomination

(noun) a number that specifies a quantity in terms of a unit (of measurement)

denomination: a value or size of a series of values or sizes (as of money)

Here, the value, rather than being a unit of measurement, is a pure dimensionless quantity; in other words the K or M parameter is the denominator.

Related, and also worth considering, is @keshlam's suggestion in the comments, to "rescale" (or simply "scale") the quantity:

rescale: Alter the scale of (a quantity), typically to make it smaller or simpler.

scale: To make in accord with a particular proportion or scale or To alter according to a standard or by degrees; adjust in calculated amounts.

Answer 6

Honza Zidek's suggestion, toKilo(), is simple and clear. If your procedure only substitutes K in place of the last three digits of a decimal number, that's probably best.

However, if it can substitute other suffixes (eg K, M, B for 3, 6, or 9 digits), consider toKMB(), or perhaps affixKMB(), using affix as verb that's more descriptive than to. From wiktionary, affix has a sense “To subjoin, annex, or add at the close or end; to append to” which is relevant in this context. Also consider appendKMB().

If in addition you have procedures that can add SI prefixes, then toKilo() causes ambiguity; more explicit names like subSIprefix() and subSIsuffix() might be desirable.

Answer 7

Because the abbreviations are based on thousands, you might be able to derive something from K-notation (like scientific notation, but with thousands instead of powers of 10). Even though the letters change, they are based on K-groups. You could use K-reduce, for instance, although you'd have to write it to remove the hyphen.

Answer 8

This process is related to the math activity known as factoring, for example:

3 x + 21 = 3(x + 7)

So, you could say that the following is factoring by K:

250,000 = 250K

Answer 9

Engineering Notation refers to a format that is similar to scientific notation, with the restriction that the power of ten used must be a multiple of three. With this restriction in place, it is easy to refer to the quantity using a metric prefix.

A couple of examples:

0.0000157 Amps = 15.7 × 10^-6 = 15.7 μA

12600 Volts           = 12.6 × 10³  = 12.6 kV

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_notation

The Wikipedia site links to some Perl Code that implements this functionality.

So, perhaps, ToEngineeringFormat() or something similar would work.

Answer 10

(Note: this replaces my deleted answer which was posted half-baked last night from my phone before I ran out of time to finish it)

In the SI system kilo- etc are referred to as prefixes (and the IEC prefix for *1024 is kibi, to avoid confusion between 2^10 and 10^3, though isn't widely used).

Prefix is of course available as a verb but a function name would need to be slightly more descriptive. Of course this prefix is a prefix to a unit, not to the value, so prefix_number() wouldn't make much logical sense. I guess generate_unit_prefix() is too long. In a sense you're appending to (discussed and dismissed above for good reasons) or postfixing/suffixing the number, but that wouldn't help the next maintainer of the code, and suffers the logical flaw that the number itself is actually modified.

Humanise was suggested, and is close enough to get my vote, but if you look at the docs for (e.g.) the Python package it's not a good fit (though some GNU tools may use the terms more in this sense, the docs I've read prefer the adjective human-readable).

The output of such a function is almost bound to be a string in many languages, while the input may be but is more likely to be a numeric data type. By analogy with toString(), I propose something along the lines of toReadableString() or toHumanString() to pair with made human-readable in prose use.

Answer 11

roundNumberWithMetricSymbol()

By coding standards the more descriptive you are the better as you have quite rightly pointed out.

The reason for using "MetricSymbol" that what you are describing is actually the correct term for the unit of measurement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system

Answer 12

What a great question! I think you're ahead of the curve on word-generation. I believe there is no such term. If there was I'd use it all the time.

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Traditionally with single-word-requests, if the answer is "there is no such word", posters make suggestions for new slang for the issue at hand. Here we go...

"S.I.-ized"

"k-isation"

"dot-com numbers"

Factoids: people in "the valley" (silicon valley) often refer to "kpa" or "k/pa" as in 390 kpa (salary, $390,000 per annum); this project's only brining in 20 kpa, etc.

So, if this came up in literature, one could perhaps use a phrase like "she always gave thousands using a 'K', like everyone else in Silicon Valley or Berlin ..."

Or, "She always said dot-com-numbers, like twenty 'K' instead of twenty thousand..."

Or for example, "Like every dreamer in silicon valley, she k'ized every number she mentioned, like twenty K or two hundred K, or if it was some particularly big dream, 800 K..."

Again - IMO there is, as yet, no current term for this really socially decisive phenomenon you raise, Jeffrey.