How Do You Spell and Abbreviate Thousand?

October 13, 2021

Regardless of why you are trying to abbreviate the word “thousand” you have come to the right place. In this article, we will teach you how to abbreviate the word and how to use the abbreviation for “thousand.” Let’s first understand what thousand means.

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How Do You Spell Thousand?

The word “thousand” is spelled: t•h•o•u•s•a•n•d. This is phonetically pronounced [THOW] + [ZUHND].

How Do You Abbreviate Thousand?

The proper thousand abbreviation can be a bit hard to remember at times due to the fact that it’s not based at all on the word we use, and the fact that using the number is common as well. The most common abbreviations of thousand are:

M
K (generally uppercase) – used in finance
thous.
mil. – Spanish
milli – Used as a prefix in the metric system
mille – Used in advertising and marketing
(10⁻³) – Scientific notation

That said it’s important to clear up that 1000 while shorter is not considered an abbreviation, as it’s just another way to write the same word.

If you are a little bit lost then don’t worry, as we said thousand is kind of weird when it comes to abbreviations.

The abbreviation M comes from Roman numerals, where the letter M always stood for a thousand, and is a particularly popular abbreviation in finances. This can be confusing since some companies use M to represent millions.

Thousand is abbreviated with M in banking records, reports, and advertising. In advertising and marketing, the M stands for milli so the abbreviation CPM means “cost per mile”.

K is by contrast a much more casual abbreviation and the one you are most likely to see in casual writing. In this case K comes from Greek, where “Kilo” is the word they use for a thousand so 1K = 1000 meters. Hence, 5K and 10K are 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters respectively.

While both abbreviations might come from somewhat unexpected places the brevity makes it easy to remember and due to how widespread the word kilo has become in general, K is by far the most popular one of the two.

Definition of Thousand

As thousand is first and foremost a mathematical concept it’s hard to give a definition for it beyond the amount, a thousand is usually described as ten times 100 or other calculations like it.

In short a thousand will always refer to the mathematical amount, that specific quantity that amounts to a grand total of 1000 units.

Thousand Separators

Numbers in the thousands often have the thousands digit separated in some way. This separator varies by country. In the United States and United Kingdom, thouands are separtaed by a comma (,). In other European countries, thousands are usually separated by a period (.). In Sweden, they use spaces.

For example:

1,000 (US and UK)
1.000 (most of Europe)
1 000 (Sweden)

For numbers larger than a million, the numbers are often grouped by thousands and separated by the separators. For example:

5,563,325
3.213.356.321
1,000,000,000

How Do You Write One Thousand in Numbers?

There are several ways to write one thousand in numbers. The first is to write a 1 followed by six zeros: 1,000,000.

You can also use exponents. The following exponents are equal to one thousand:

10^3
1000^1
1,000,000^(1/2)

Also, depending on the country, locals might write one thousand in different ways including the following:

United States and United Kingdom: 1,000
Switzerland: 1′000
Germany and other European countries: 1.000
Russia: 1˙234
France, Sweden, and Australia: 1 000
India (some systems) 1,000

Synonyms for Thousand

Technically speaking there are no synonyms for the word thousand, kilo is commonly used to replace it but as we mentioned above it’s a foreign word rather than a synonym. Likewise based on context millennium can be used as well, but this only works when we speak of a thousand years.

In general you are more likely to see thousand abbreviated with equivalent amounts like ten hundreds over seeing alternate words.

When to Use the Abbreviation

The general rule for abbreviations says that we should only use them when saving space on a text is a major concern, which means that if we resort to M or K it’ll most likely be due to needing to write in limited space, like newspaper headers, presentation cards, or the like.

However as we mentioned before M is most commonly used in finance, as such it’s rather common to see thousand abbreviated in bank reports, financial summaries and official communications in the economic industry. And you’ll see it a lot, since bank reports need to use the amount a lot due to the large amount of money moving around.

K on the other hand is best used in common discussion, as Kilo is just a more common word and people are more likely to identify it over M.