There Are No Words...

Let's say you lived in England sometime just before calendars needed four digits instead of three, and you had a hankering to describe an amount of things. You had, for whatever reason, found a thousand somethings and it turned out there were a thousand of the thousand somethings. You could write "a thousand thousand," but you were about out of paper and didn't have the room for it.

According to this article by Pierre Bienaimé at Nautilus, you would have been out of luck, because "million," the word we would use, didn't exist yet. Language researchers suggest that there wasn't a need for the word because most people rarely encountered anything in that kind of quantity. Most people's worlds were pretty limited. Rich people might have thousands of certain kinds of animals and kings might have thousands of men in their armies. But at least in Old-English-speaking areas, you could account for almost every number you'd regularly run across by referring to multiples of those thousands.

Bienaimé's article points out that the word "million" was probably imported from French along with a lot of words we use today, in the years following William the Conqueror's 11th century invasion of the British Isles. Advances in mathematics and encounters with wider regions of the world than those known before meant people ran across the idea often enough that they grabbed a word to use to replace the clumsy "thousand thousand." The doubled phrase retains a kind of archaic flair and that seems to be the usual purpose if it's used today.

Words, whether newly minted or not, do seem to crop up as they're needed. When I bought my first computer, it featured an amazing 56K modem, meaning of course that it could transmit 56,000 bytes of data every second. In discussing speeds and file sizes, we often used "K" as a descriptor. "Meg" or "megs" and "gig" and "gigs" get used more often today, and we are probably on our way to whatever shortened version of terabytes and petabytes we will be bragging about in five or ten years. Or sooner.