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Term for the unit of grouping large numbers?

English Language & Usage Asked by Elijah Madden on April 7, 2021

I asked this on mathoverflow but I guess it’s not so appropriate there so…

In English and probably most (if not all) western languages, we group numbers by powers of 1000. So we have:
ones, tens, hundreds – then
thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands – and so on.

We may take this for granted but it’s not universal. In Japanese, for example, we have something like:
ichi (ones), jyuu (tens), hyaku (hundreds), sen (thousands) – then
man (ten-thousands), jyuu-man (hundred-thousands), hyaku-man (millions), sen-man (ten-millions) – then
oku (hundred-millions), jyuu-oku (billions), hyaku-oku (ten-billions), sen-oku (hundred-billions)

So my question is: is there a term for this grouping? Can we say something like, "The [term] in english is 10^3 but the [term] in Japanese is 10^4."

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