Saturday 5 March 2005

We'll take a padam rupees please, thank you. Or even just neel. Or a kharab.

We didn't know these words existed till we bumped into this page about the Indian numbering system on Wikipedia.

You know a lakh (ooh, we knew one once, and then we started freelancing) is 1 followed by five zeros, and a crore is 100 times that, or ten million.

Now meet their bigger siblings:
An arab (1,00,00,00,000) has nine zeroes and equals a billion.
Kharab - 1,00,00,00,00,000 - eleven zeroes = 100 billion.
neel - 1,00,00,00,00,00,000 - thirteen zeroes = 10 trillion.
padam - 1,00,00,00,00,00,00,000 - fifteen zeroes = 1 quadrillion.
shank - 1,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,000 - 17 zeroes = 100 quadrillion.

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