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Giga- ( or ) is a metric prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of a short-scale billion or long-scale milliard (109 or 1,000,000,000). It has the symbol G.
Giga- is derived from the Ancient Greek word γίγας ( gígas), meaning "". The Oxford English Dictionary reports the earliest written use of giga in this sense to be in the Reports of the IUPAC 14th Conférence Internationale de Chimie in 1947: "The following prefixes to abbreviations for the names of units should be used: G giga 109×." However, it was already used in 1932 by the German organization Verband deutscher Elektrotechniker.
When referring to information units in computing, such as gigabyte, giga may sometimes mean (230); this causes ambiguity. Standards organizations discourage this and use giga- to refer to 109 in this context too. NIST Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (Appendix D. ref 5) Gigabit is only rarely used with the binary interpretation of the prefix. The binary prefix gibi has been adopted for 230, while reserving giga exclusively for the metric definition.
According to the American writer Kevin Self, a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 109 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse (evidently "Anto-logie") by the German humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of his Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). These This suggests that a hard German was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain when the (soft g) pronunciation came into occasional use, but claimed that as of 1995 it had returned to (hard g).
In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the pronunciation of gigabyte starting with (as in gig), 9% with (as in jig), 6% with ( guy), and 1% with (as in giant).Wells, J. C. (1998). LPD pronunciation preference poll 1998.
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