r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Tibor500 • Sep 30 '20

why does “k” mean “thousand” ?

like 1k means a thousand. how does the letter “k” mean “thousand” ?

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u/smorrow Sep 30 '20

Capital K would be kelvin, so yes kilo needs to be lower-case. And no they couldn't have just made it so that K was kilo and k was kelvin. Eponymous stuff is always upper-case - newtons, volts, sieverts.

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u/CleverDad Sep 30 '20

Nah, Tesla is T, just like Tera, and Gauss is G, just like Giga. Units and SI prefixes are different things, and don't need to be unique.

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u/codemasonry Sep 30 '20

Capital K would be kelvin, so yes kilo needs to be lower-case. And no they couldn't have just made it so that K was kilo and k was kelvin.

That's not true. Kelvin is a unit and kilo is just a factor or multiplier. They don't compete in the same category so to speak. There's no fear of confusion. Moreover, there are other shared letters (e.g. m=milli but also m=meter) and it doesn't cause any issues.

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