A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decimal. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The prefix kilo-, for example, may be added to gram to indicate multiplication by one thousand: one kilogram is equal to one thousand grams. The prefix milli-, likewise, may be added to metre to indicate division by one thousand; one millimetre is equal to one thousandth of a metre.
Decimal multiplicative prefixes have been a feature of all forms of the metric system, with six of these dating back to the system's introduction in the 1790s. Metric prefixes have also been used with some non-metric units. The SI prefixes are metric prefixes that were standardised for use in the International System of Units (SI) by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in resolutions dating from 1960 to 2022.
List of SI prefixes
The BIPM specifies twenty-four prefixes for the International System of Units (SI).
The first uses of prefixes in SI date back to the definition of kilogram after the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Several more prefixes came into use, and were recognised by the 1947 IUPAC 14th International Conference of Chemistry
The prefixes that were most recently adopted are ronna, quetta, ronto, and quecto. These prefixes were adopted in 2022, after a proposal from British metrologist Richard J. C. Brown. (Before 2022, Q/q and R/r were the only Latin letters available for abbreviations, with all other Latin letters being already used for other prefixes (atto-, centi-, deci-, exa-, femto-, giga-, hecto-, kilo-, mega-, milli-, nano-, peta-, pico-, tera-, yotta-, yocto-, zetta-, zepto-) or already used for SI units (including: SI base units, SI derived units, Non-SI units mentioned in the SI) (ampere, B, coulomb, day, farad, gram, H, hour, joule, kelvin, litre, metre, N, S, second, T, tonne, u, Volt, Watt) or easily confused with mathematical operators (I and l are easily confused with 1, O and o are easily confused with 0, X and x are easily confused with ×)). The large prefixes ronna and quetta were adopted in anticipation of needs for use in data science, and because unofficial prefixes that did not meet SI requirements were already circulating. The small prefixes were also added, even without such a driver, in order to maintain symmetry.
The prefixes from peta to quetta are based on the Ancient Greek or Ancient Latin numbers from 5 to 10, referring to the 5th through 10th powers of 103. The initial letter h has been removed from some of these stems and the initial letters z, y, r, and q have been added, ascending in reverse alphabetical order, to avoid confusion with other metric prefixes.
Rules
-
The symbols for the units of measure are combined with the symbols for each prefix name. The SI symbols for kilometre, kilogram, and kilowatt, for instance, are km, kg, and kW, respectively. (The symbol for kilo is k.) Except for the early prefixes of kilo, hecto, and deca, the symbols for the prefixes for multiples are uppercase letters, and those for the prefixes for submultiples are lowercase letters.
-
All of the metric prefix symbols are made from upper- and lower-case Latin alphabet except for the symbol for micro, which is uniquely a Greek letter .
-
The prefix symbols are always prepended to the symbol for the unit without any intervening space or punctuation.
-
Prefixes corresponding to an integer power of one thousand are generally preferred; the prefixes corresponding to tens (deci-, deca-) and hundreds (centi-, hecto-) are less common and are disfavoured in certain fields. Hence, 100 m is preferred over 1 hm (hectometre) or 10 dam (decametres). The prefixes deci- and centi-, and less frequently hecto and deca, are generally used for informal purposes; the centimetre (cm) is especially common. Some modern building codes require that the millimetre be used in preference to the centimetre, because "use of centimetres leads to extensive usage of decimal points and confusion".
-
Prefixes may not be used in combination on a single symbol. This includes the case of the base unit kilogram, which already contains a prefix. For example, milligram (mg) is used instead of microkilogram (μkg).
-
During mathematical operations, prefixes are treated as multiplicative factors. For example, 5 km is treated as 5000 m, which allows all quantities based on the same unit to be factored together even if they have different prefixes.
-
A prefix symbol attached to a unit symbol is included when the unit is raised to a power. For example, 1 km2 denotes 1 km × 1 km = 106 m2, not 103 m2.
Usage
Examples
-
The mass of an electron is about 1 rg (rontogram).
-
The mass of 1 litre of water is about 1 kg (kilogram).
-
The mass of the Earth is about 6 Rg (ronnagrams).
-
The mass of Jupiter is about 2 Qg (quettagrams).
Examples of powers of units with metric prefixes
-
1 km2 means one square kilometre, or the area of a square of by . In other words, an area of and not .
-
2 Mm3 means two cubic , or the volume of two of by by , i.e. , and not ().
Examples with prefixes and powers
-
× = × = = .
-
+ = + = .
-
= = = 0.05 m.
-
= = = = = .
-
3 MW = = 3 × = .
Micro symbol
When
mega and
micro were adopted in 1873, three prefixes existed starting with "m". It was necessary to use a symbol other than upper and lowercase 'm'. Eventually the Greek letter "μ" was adopted.
With the lack of a "μ" key on most typewriters, as well as computer keyboards, various other abbreviations remained common, including "mc", "mic", M, and "u".
From about 1960 onwards, "u" prevailed in type-written documents. Because ASCII, EBCDIC, and other common encodings lacked code-points for "", this tradition remained even as computers replaced typewriters.
When ISO 8859-1 was created, it included the "" symbol for micro at codepoint ; later, the whole of ISO 8859-1 was incorporated into the initial version of Unicode. Many fonts that support both characters render them identically, but because the micro sign and the Greek lower-case letter have different applications (normally, a Greek letter would be used with other Greek letters, but the micro sign is never used like that), some fonts render them differently, e.g. Linux Libertine and Segoe UI.
Keyboard entry
Most English-language keyboards do not have a "" key, so it is necessary to use a key-code; this varies depending on the operating system, physical keyboard layout, and user's language.
- For all keyboard layouts
- * On Microsoft Windows systems,
- ** arbitrary Unicode codepoints can be entered in decimal with: sustained, , and releasing . A leading "0" is required
(this registers as the corresponding Unicode hexadecimal code-point, 0xB5 = 181.), or
- ** arbitrary Unicode codepoints can be entered in hexadecimal as:
(up to 5 hexadecimal characters, not counting the leading '+', upper or lower case), or
- ** in the tradition of MS-DOS, IBM code page 437 one can also enter old code-points in decimal:
(the leading zero must be omitted);
- * On Linux systems,
- ** under X11, when a Compose key has been enabled:
- ** under X11, with ibus version 1.5.19 (or higher) active, and a non-composing input method selected: The default keybinding for starting codepoint input is . The key sequence then produces U+00B5, the micro sign.
- ** on the VGA console's virtual terminals like tty1: arbitrary Unicode codepoints can be entered in decimal as: sustained, , and releasing . A leading "0" is not required.
- For QWERTY keyboard layouts
- * On Linux systems,
- ** code-point U+00b5 can be entered as (provided the right alt key is configured to act as ).
- * On MacOS systems, code-point U+00b5 can be entered as either or .
Typesetting in LaTeX
The
LaTeX typesetting system features an
SIunitx package in which the units of measurement are spelled out, for example,
\qty{3}{\tera\hertz} formats as "3 THz".
Application to units of measurement
The use of prefixes can be traced back to the introduction of the metric system in the 1790s, long before the 1960 introduction of the SI.
The prefixes, including those introduced after 1960, are used with any metric unit, whether officially included in the SI or not (e.g., millidyne and milligauss). Metric prefixes may also be used with some non-metric units, but not, for example, with the non-SI units of time.
Metric units
Mass
The units
kilogram,
gram,
milligram, microgram, and smaller are commonly used for measurement of
mass. However, megagram, gigagram, and larger are rarely used;
(and kilotonnes, megatonnes, etc.) or scientific notation are used instead. The megagram does not share the risk of confusion that the tonne has with other units with the name "ton".
The kilogram is the only coherent unit of the International System of Units that includes a metric prefix.
Volume
The
litre (equal to a cubic decimetre), millilitre (equal to a cubic centimetre), microlitre, and smaller are common. In Europe, the centilitre is often used for liquids, and the decilitre is used less frequently. Bulk agricultural products, such as grain, beer and wine, often use the hectolitre (100 litres).
Larger volumes are usually denoted in kilolitres, megalitres or gigalitres, or else in cubic metres (1 cubic metre = 1 kilolitre) or cubic kilometres (1 cubic kilometre = 1 teralitre). For scientific purposes, the cubic metre is usually used.
Length
The kilometre, metre, centimetre, millimetre, and smaller units are common. The decimetre is rarely used. The micrometre is often referred to by the older non-SI name
micron, which is officially deprecated. In some fields, such as
chemistry, the
Angstrom (0.1 nm) has been used commonly instead of the nanometre. The
femtometre, used mainly in particle physics, is sometimes called a fermi. For large scales, megametre, gigametre, and larger are rarely used. Instead, ad hoc non-metric units are used, such as the
solar radius, astronomical units,
, and
; the astronomical unit is mentioned in the SI standards as an accepted non-SI unit.
Time
Prefixes for the SI standard unit
second are most commonly encountered for quantities less than one second. For larger quantities, the system of
(60 seconds),
(60 minutes) and
(24 hours) is accepted for use with the SI and more commonly used. When speaking of spans of time, the length of the day is usually standardised to seconds so as not to create issues with the irregular
leap second.
Larger multiples of the second such as kiloseconds and megaseconds are occasionally encountered in scientific contexts, but are seldom used in common parlance. For long-scale scientific work, particularly in astronomy, the Julian year or annum (a) is a standardised variant of the year, equal to exactly seconds ( days). The unit is so named because it was the average length of a year in the Julian calendar. Long time periods are then expressed by using metric prefixes with the annum, such as megaannum (Ma) or gigaannum (Ga).
Angle
The SI unit of angle is the
/ref>
Temperature
Common practice does not typically use the flexibility allowed by official policy in the case of the degree Celsius (°C). NIST states:
"Prefix symbols may be used with the unit symbol °C and prefix names may be used with the unit name
degree Celsius. For example, 12 m°C (12 millidegrees Celsius) is acceptable." In practice, it is more common for prefixes to be used with the
kelvin when it is desirable to denote extremely large or small absolute temperatures or temperature differences. Thus, temperatures of star interiors may be given with the unit of MK (megakelvin), and molecular cooling may be given with the unit mK (millikelvin).
Energy
In use the
joule and kilojoule are common, with larger multiples seen in limited contexts. In addition, the
kilowatt-hour, a composite unit formed from the kilowatt and hour, is often used for electrical energy; other multiples can be formed by modifying the prefix of watt (e.g. terawatt-hour).
Several definitions exist for the non-SI unit calorie. Distinguished are gram calories and kilogram calories. One kilogram calorie, which equals one thousand gram calories, often appears capitalized and without a prefix (i.e. Cal) when referring to "Calorie" in food.
Non-metric units
Metric prefixes are widely used outside the metric SI system. Common examples include the
megabyte and the
decibel. Metric prefixes rarely appear with
imperial units or US units except in some special cases (e.g., microinch, kilofoot,
kilopound). They are also used with other specialised units used in particular fields (e.g.,
megaelectronvolt,
gigaparsec,
millibarn,
kilodalton). In astronomy, geology, and palaeontology, the year, with symbol 'a' (from the Latin
annus), is commonly used with metric prefixes:
Kiloannus, Ma, and Ga.
Official policies about the use of SI prefixes with non-SI units vary slightly between the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) and the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For instance, the NIST advises that "to avoid confusion, prefix symbols (and prefix names) are not used with the time-related unit symbols (names) min (minute), h (hour), d (day); nor with the angle-related symbols (names) ° (degree), ′ (minute), and ″ (second)",
Non-standard prefixes
Obsolete metric prefixes
Some of the prefixes formerly used in the metric system have fallen into disuse and were not adopted into the SI.
The decimal prefix for ten thousand,
myria- (sometimes spelt
myrio-), and the early binary prefixes
double- (2×) and
demi- (×) were parts of the original metric system adopted by France in 1795,
but were not retained when the SI prefixes were internationally adopted by the 11th CGPM conference in 1960.
Other metric prefixes used historically include hebdo- () and micri- ().
Double prefixes
Double prefixes have been used in the past, such as
micromillimetres or
millimicrons (now
),
micromicrofarads (μμF; now
, pF),
kilomegatonnes (now
),
hectokilometres (now 100
) and the derived adjective
hectokilometric (typically used for qualifying the fuel consumption measures).
These are not compatible with the SI.
Other obsolete double prefixes included "decimilli-" (), which was contracted to "dimi-"[ (a translation of the French original Esprit et bon usage du système métrique, 1965 )] and standardised in France up to 1961.
There are no more letters of the Latin alphabet available for new prefixes (all the unused letters are already used for units). As such, Richard J.C. Brown (who proposed the prefixes adopted for and ) has proposed a reintroduction of compound prefixes (e.g. kiloquetta- for ) if a driver for prefixes at such scales ever materialises, with a restriction that the last prefix must always be quetta- or quecto-. This usage has not been approved by the BIPM.
Similar symbols and abbreviations
In written English, the symbol
K is often used informally to indicate a multiple of thousand in many contexts. For example, one may talk of a
40K salary (), or call the Year 2000 problem the
Y2K problem. In these cases, an uppercase K is often used with an implied unit (although it could then be confused with the symbol for the kelvin temperature unit if the context is unclear). This informal postfix is read or spoken as "thousand", "grand", or just "k".
The financial and general news media mostly use m or M, b or B, and t or T as abbreviations for million, billion (109) and trillion (1012), respectively, for large quantities, typically currency
The Medicine and automotive fields in the United States use the abbreviations cc or ccm for cubic centimetres. One cubic centimetre is equal to one millilitre.
For nearly a century, engineers used the abbreviation MCM to designate a "thousand " in specifying the cross-sectional area of large electrical cables. Since the mid-1990s, kcmil has been adopted as the official designation of a thousand circular mils, but the designation MCM still remains in wide use. A similar system is used in natural gas sales in the United States: m (or M) for thousands and mm (or MM) for millions (thousand thousands) of British thermal units or , and in the oil industry,
See also
Footnotes
External links
