One Hundred Lakhs Makes a Crore

Friday, May 19th, 2006

If you do business in India, or with Indians, you need to get used to hearing large numbers expressed in lakhs or crores:

A lakh (also spelled lac, lacs, lacks or laksha) is a unit in a traditional number system, widely used both in official and other contexts in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. One lakh is equal to a hundred thousand (105). A hundred lakhs make a crore or ten million.

This system of measurement also introduces separators into numbers in a place that is different from what is common outside India. For example, 3 million (30 lakh) would be written as 30,00,000 instead of 3,000,000.

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