https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centi-

Update: looked into this more and the "centi" part of the SI system comes from the Latin word "centum" which means 100, not 1/100. Definitely seems either usage is acceptable.

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/centimeter

(They did the same for 1000 and 1/1000, deriving milli from Latin millum and kilo from Greek χίλιοι, but used Latin for both deca- and deci-, and used Greek for both giga- and micro. So far for consistency)

I don’t see how it follows that either usage is acceptable.

Prefixes can have dual uses. Sometimes even the same whole word has dual uses, e.g. biannual meaning either twice a year or once every two years.

Edit: I don’t know why I even reached for an analogy, it’s exactly like saying hundred and hundredth are interchangeable.

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Language evolves.

It’s a convention of the SI system that Latin prefixes are the fractional units, but that’s not a feature of the Latin words themselves.

The "centimillionaire" to describe wealth of $100+ million has been used for many years before this thread's article. Here's an old newspaper article about Enron from 2003: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/business/company-man-to-t...

>In one year, Mr. Lay has been transformed from a centimillionaire with huge stock holdings to a multimillionaire whose wealth is mostly tied up in hard-to-sell assets.

And some extra trivia... your "correction" and the followup replies is replaying Groundhog Day... e.g. 9 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319279

17,000 millions

by definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(Japanese_prosody)

My mapper mindset[1] can't let this pass. Corruption of the language like that creeps me out.

I've enjoyed the times I was a milli-millionaire in life, and I was a Centi-millionaire once when we paid for the house, but these days being a micro-millionaire is a treat.

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers

I'm a demographic outlier with zero social connections via HN. No one on HN routinely emails me, chats with me on the social platform formerly known as Twitter, meets me for coffee in person, etc.

So the only feedback I have is upvotes, downvotes, flags and comments and that's frequently difficult to decifer.

I submit things I think are interesting and accept that most of what I submit will be roundly ignored. But then this seems true for most submissions, so it's not a strong signal (shrug).

I have no idea why this got upvoted enough to briefly make the front page.

Which of my submissions does well and which doesn't frequently baffles me. I no longer waste a lot of time trying to figure it out.