Myriad

Ancient GreekTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Ten thousand. The word comes from Greek; in Chinese, Japanese and Korean numbers are grouped in myriads (萬/万) rather than thousands.

1 myriad = 10,000 pieces (exactly).

About the myriad

Greek arithmetic had a single word for ten thousand, murias, which gave English the word myriad. Its own origin is uncertain. Greek numerals wrote it with a capital mu, and Archimedes used the myriad myriad, or one hundred million, as the base of the large-number scheme in his Sand Reckoner.

English speakers now use myriad mostly to mean a vast, unspecified number, and the exact 10,000 survives mainly in translations from Greek, Latin or Chinese. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese still count in groups of 10,000, so that one million is expressed as one hundred wan. Other languages have a dedicated word as well, including Sanskrit ayuta, Old Turkic tumen and Hebrew revava. The prefix myria- stood for 10,000 in the original French metric system of 1795 but fell out of use, and a myriad is also a 100 kilometer grid square in British and US military mapping.

Sources: Wikipedia: Myriad

Myriad conversion chart

1 myriad expressed in every other counting & quantity unit:

More Ancient Greek units

• stadion (length)
• Greek foot (Olympic) (length)
• Attic talent (weight & mass)
• Attic mina (weight & mass)
• Attic drachma (weight & mass)
• obol (weight & mass)
• olympiad (time)

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