From myrias we get the English word myriad meaning “an extremely large number or amount”. The ancients also had the “myriad myriad” (10,000 × 10,000) or one hundred million. He explains this system in The Sand Reckoner, a treatise that sets out to quantify all the grains of sand in the universe in order to challenge https://www.bookstime.com/articles/bookkeeping-clean-up-guide the idea that such a quantity was too large to be counted. Frequently, in finance and accounting settings now, an analyst will use k to denote thousands and a capitalized M to denote millions. “mm” is often left uncapitalized (though there are no specific rules that state which way it should be written).

The Roman numeral M is used to indicate units in thousands. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M. Using uppercase (“MM”) or lowercase (“mm”) are both fine, as long as you’re consistent.

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That said, if your organization types M and information doesn’t cause confusion, him are free to used M to abbreviate one million. Especially when it comes to measurements and the difference between M, mm, and ml and mil. As we dig in, one consistent thing you’ll notice is the prefix “mil” which means thousand or thousandth. The use of two m’s to denote millions what does mm mean is becoming less common. Frequently, in finance and accounting, an analyst will use k to denote thousands and a capitalized M to denote millions. I worked in banking for 27 years (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Bank of America), and my experience in financial services was that M and MM were consistently used for thousands and millions, respectively.

This guide will explore how the notation should be used, as well as alternative symbols that are used in practice. Over 1.8 million professionals use CFI to learn accounting, financial analysis, modeling and more. Start with a free account to explore 20+ always-free courses and hundreds of finance templates and cheat sheets. However, it’s fairly uncommon for “Million” to be abbreviated outside of scientific circles. Most native speakers wouldn’t care much about “million” as an abbreviation because they won’t often come across the number in their daily lives.

What Does M and MM Mean in Accounting?

This practice was across the board – exam reports, internal reporting, and so on. Traditionally, M is used as the symbol for thousands and MM for millions in the business world, particularly in accounting. However, there has been a growing tendency to use K as the symbol for thousands instead of M. The most commonly seen short forms for thousand, million, billion and trillion in North America and the United Kingdom, respectively, are outlined in the table below. In fact, the largest number with a single-word name in ancient Greek was 10,000. It was called murios and borrowed into Late Latin as myrias.

1 million in numbers other numerals is written as 1,000,000 in Math. While you can make MM stand for millions of anything, it’s important that the reader knows whether you’re talking about dollars, euros, units shipped, etc. If, say, you use it for both units and dollars in the same document, separate the different categories so your readers don’t get confused. Roman numerals are often used in accounting to help abbreviate and designate numbers. For example, the Roman numeral MM is frequently used to designate that the units used in presenting information (financial and non-financial) in millions.

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Scientific notation represents numbers in powers of ten, so that 650 billion can be written as 650 × 109 or as 6.50 × 1011. The word “million” is not a commonly abbreviated word, but its abbreviations still have their place. An abbreviation for million is most often seen in financial documents and paperwork. Swap the word “million” for “mil” or “mm” to avoid redundant language but to still be specific in how large numbers you’re working with.