Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 September 26

= September 26 =

First use of 'K' in currency?
Roughly when did k come into common usage as an abbreviation for "thousand dollars", e.g. $20K for twenty thousand dollars? I don't think I recall hearing it prior to the 21st century, and assumed it was influenced by the term "Y2K Bug". Muzilon (talk) 13:36, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The OED has a citation for its use for a thousand dollars from a job advert in 1968. It certainly does not strike my British ears as particularly new. One would expect to hear Kojak or Regan & Carter using it. DuncanHill (talk) 13:51, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I would have expected Kojak to say something like "twenty grand", actually :) Muzilon (talk) 14:10, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Or "twenty large". --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  08:16, 27 September 2022 (UTC)


 * I've always assumed it was derived from the kilo prefix (since that means 1000 as well after all), but is that actually the case? If it is, I very much doubt the usage started in currency. Fgf10 (talk) 14:59, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The Online Etymology Dictionary entry for k says "Slang meaning "one thousand dollars" is 1970s, from kilo-." --Amble (talk) 17:11, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * In the '70s if someone said "I have two kilos" it would be assumed to mean 2 kilograms of cocaine or somesuch, not $2000. (Aka "a couple of keys") 136.56.52.157 (talk) 18:36, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * K, for 1000 in currency is from its use as an abbreviation for kilo, per OED, but that does not mean that anyone would have said kilo for a thousand in money. OED has k for "thousand" initially in computing (1966) and transferred to money a couple of years later. DuncanHill (talk) 18:43, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I wonder if K was adopted more quickly in US (or UK) English then. When I googled it, the first hit was this article by a US underwriter which doesn't really answer my question about timeframes, but points out that M (the Roman numeral) is also used in the accounting world to mean $1,000. Muzilon (talk) 22:43, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * The OED's 1968 cite is US ("Salaries $15–45K"), but there is a UK one from 1970 ("Sal. from £1,600 to £2·4k" &mdash; note incidentally that the raised dot was then still the decimal point in Britain). Those dates are close enough to say that we can't tell which was really first. --174.95.81.219 (talk) 23:30, 26 September 2022 (UTC)


 * We talked about a closely related subject fairly recently: here. Matt Deres (talk) 17:29, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

I remember terms like "30K miles" [odometer readings] and "3K OBO" [prices] being commonplace in classified ads for used cars in the U.S. in the 1980s, and a full-text search of the newspapers.com archives just turned up plenty of them in that decade, depending on the exact search terms. It confirmed my memory that most used car buyers at that time were quite familiar with the notation of "-K" for "thousand" in the contexts of odometer miles and prices. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:16, 5 October 2022 (UTC)