One Million Views and Just As Many Words to Define It

Sometime last night, we surpassed one million page views on this blog. That’s a bit astounding to me, as this blog is only 4 3/4 months old. *(I measure time like my children do now. My son is not 3 and he’s not 3 1/2, but he’s not quite 4, so of course he is 3 3/4 years old).*

We weren’t even tracking statistics on our old blog, and I barely look at my website traffic, but these stats have been really cool to follow. So as my mind boggled a bit at one million page views in a matter of months, I went to where I always go to confirm data: Wikipedia!

So, what exactly is one million…..? If you are a word geek like me, you’ll actually find some of this interesting:

One million (1,000,000), or one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001. In scientific notation, it is written as 106.[1] Physical quantities can also be expressed using the SI prefix mega, when dealing with SI units. For example, 1 megawatt equals 1,000,000 watts.

Il Milione is the title of Marco Polo’s narration of his travel to China. The name is supposed to come from Polo’s nickname after his tales of riches and multitudes.

The word “million” is common to the short scale and long scale numbering systems (and also to the proposed Rowlett numbering system), unlike the larger numbers, which have different names in the two systems. The name is derived from Italian, where mille was 1,000, and 1,000,000 became millione, “a large thousand”.

It went on for quite a bit more, like the fact that 1,000,000 is the smallest 7-digit prime number, etc., but I think it’s safe to say that, at that point, it stopped being interesting 🙂