Millions to Yi / Oku (M to yi)

1 million equals 0.01 yi / oku exactly.

1 million = 0.01 yi / oku

How to convert millions to yi / oku

To convert millions to yi / oku, multiply the number of millions by 0.01. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply yi / oku by 100.

yi / oku = millions × 0.01

Example: 10 millions = 0.1 yi / oku.

Large-number names differ around the world: this site uses the short scale (billion = 10⁹) by default, and lists the long-scale billion separately.

About these units

Million (M)

General & non-SICurrent unit

One million (10⁶).

Million comes from Italian. Old Italian milione was built from mille, a thousand, plus an augmentative ending, so it began as something like a big thousand. The name proved useful as a stem: by 1475 the French mathematician Jehan Adam was already building larger names from it, bymillion and trimillion, for 10¹² and 10¹⁸. The short and long scales agree on the million itself, 1,000,000 or 10⁶, and diverge only for the larger names. The SI prefix mega- stands for 10⁶.

Millions are hard to feel. Counting out a million items one by one is famously laborious, yet a million seconds lasts only about 11.57 days. A billion seconds, by contrast, is roughly 31.7 years.

1 million = 1,000,000 pieces (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Million; Wikipedia: Names of large numbers; BIPM SI Brochure, 9th edition (2019)

Yi / Oku (East Asian) (yi)

ChineseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One hundred million (10⁸), written 億 / 亿 in Chinese and Japanese (oku) and Korean (eok). East Asian counting groups numbers by myriads.

Chinese counting does not group digits in threes. It groups them in fours, so 1,234,567,890 is read as 12 yi, 3456 wan, 7890. Wan is 10,000 and yi is 10,000 times wan, giving 100,000,000. In Japanese the same character is read oku and in Korean eok. The yi is therefore a pure number with no physical dimension, and its base here is simply one.

This myriad system differs from English, which builds on thousands. One million is 100 wan, and one billion in the short scale is 10 yi, since these languages have no native words for powers of one thousand. Ancient texts wrote 10,000 squared as wan wan before yi became the name. Older usage differed, and yi once stood for 10 to the 5th. The next unit, zhao, is 10 to the 12th in Taiwan, Japan and Korea, but mainland China has used it for a million, so official documents avoid it.

1 yi / oku (East Asian) = 100,000,000 pieces (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Chinese numerals; Wikipedia: Myriad

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