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Mega is a unit prefix in metric systems of units denoting a factor of one million (10 6 or 1 000 000). It has the unit symbol M . It was confirmed for use in the International System of Units (SI) in 1960.
It has since become common in other English-speaking nations and several other countries. For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the United Kingdom largely used the long scale, [ 4 ] [ 8 ] whereas the United States used the short scale, [ 8 ] so that the two systems were often referred to as British and American in the English language .
The tenth power of 2 (2 10) has the value 1024, which is close to 1000. This has prompted the use of the metric prefixes kilo, mega, and giga to also denote the powers of 1024 which is common in information technology with the unit of digital information, the byte. Units of information are not covered in the International System of Units.
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. [1] [2] Since 2009, they have formed part of the ISO/IEC 80000 standard.
Two naming scales for large numbers have been used in English and other European languages since the early modern era: the long and short scales. Most English variants use the short scale today, but the long scale remains dominant in many non-English-speaking areas, including continental Europe and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
A common usage has been to designate one megabyte as 1 048 576 bytes (2 20 B), a quantity that conveniently expresses the binary architecture of digital computer memory. Standards bodies have deprecated this binary usage of the mega- prefix in favor of a new set of binary prefixes, [2] by means of which the quantity 2 20 B is named mebibyte ...
A googol is the large number 10 100 or ten to the power of one hundred. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros: 10, 000, 000 ...
The factor is intended to make reading comprehension easier than a lengthy series of zeros. For example, 1.0 × 10 9 expresses one billion—1 followed by nine zeros. The reciprocal, one billionth, is 1.0 × 10 −9.