Today, people are increasingly using the letter K instead of the unit of thousand. Why is that?
Nowadays, the younger generation often uses the letter “K” as a symbol for currency. For example, 200k = 200,000 VND, 20k = 20,000 VND… However, not everyone understands why “1k” equals 1,000. Let’s explore this topic in this article.
The letter “K” after a number is an abbreviation for kilo.
In fact, the letter “K” after a number is an abbreviation for kilo, a prefix that is placed before an international unit of measurement to indicate a multiple of 10^3 or 1,000 times.
The kilo prefix means “thousand” and originates from Greek. In 1795, this prefix was introduced by the research group of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and by 1799 it was incorporated into the metric system in France. For example, 1,000m = 1km.
The kilo multiple is also used in other units of measurement such as kilogram, kilobyte, etc.
This event in the year 2000 is known as the Y2K incident (Year 2000 Problem).
Additionally, in the year 2000, a significant issue occurred with millions of computers worldwide. Previously, to simplify things, system programmers only used the last two digits to represent the year. For example, 1999 was represented as 99, and 1900 was 00… However, in the year 2000, computers would interpret the year 2000 as 1900 because the last two digits for both years were the same.
At this point, computers using the YEAR function would malfunction, leading to unpredictable consequences. Therefore, to correct this programming error, a global campaign was launched to ensure that all four digits of the year were properly input into computers. This event in the year 2000 is referred to as the Y2K incident (Year 2000 Problem).
For these reasons, many people today often use the kilo multiple to represent units that differ by 1,000, or simply understand it as using the letter K to replace three zeros (000).
