Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Lakh and crores

Two new words I've learned that Indians used in everyday life are lakh and crore.

Lakh = one hundred thousand, 100,000 and written as 1,00,000
Crore = ten million, 10,000,000 and written as 1,00,00,000

The terms are used in place of the English unit, so instead of saying five hundred thousand rupees, you would say 5 lakhs. For sixty million people, you would say 6 crores.

From Wikipedia, I've learned that these terms are widely used in Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Pakistan. The words are also originally derived from Sanskrit, so they actually exist in some form in other languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Thai.

In India, Slumdog Millionaire was actually advertised as Slumdog Crorepati, with a crorepati equal to 10 million rupees.

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