When Did We: Stop using commas to separate 000s?
When I went through school we were taught to separate 000s with a comma—e.g,: 1,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 and for fractions 123.123,456 or 0.404,5. This gave the reader an instant visual guide to the magnitude of the number.
In 2nd year high school my science teacher would mark a question wrong if the 000s commas were not used to the left of the decimal point.
Up until the last ten or so years you would rarely encounter a 000s number written without the 000s comma.
However, in 2021, and probably for the last five to ten years, it has become common for the 000s comma to be missing.
Take, for example, the BlockClock Mini which connects to the Internet and shows you the conversion rate of many cryptocurrencies. No comma!
While reputable publications with trained copy-editors will almost always use the 000s comma, I am finding more and more Internet-based publications are forgetting the 000s comma. I say forgetting because I don’t think they purposely leave the 000s comma out, they just don’t realise it has been missed. They forgot it.
As another example, following is a clip from my latest water bill showing the GRV as $25480.
Surely in these days of computerisation it would have only been a few more lines of code to have the value shown as $25,480—as it should have been!