scott.cr
Flashlight Enthusiast
Here's something that might interest you CPFers, since we talk about volts, watts, milliamps, milliamp-hours and such... rules I've followed as a professional technical writer in my work, but never fully realized why.
When terms come from a proper name, we spell them out in lowercase. 10 volts, 20 newton-meters... Rudolph Diesel invented it, but it's a diesel engine. When abbreviating, we use the uppercase. 10 V, 20 Nm, etc.
Ampere, Volt, Watt, Weber... all people's names.
How about kilo, mega, giga...? The rules are a bit hazier here. Usually, milli and kilo are abbreviated with a lowercase "m" and "k" respectively. It's a 10 kW dummy load or an LED that requires 100 mA of current. Micro is abbreviated with the Greek letter mu, or µ. Some engineers make a super-big deal about not using a lowercase "u" instead, and insist on the usage of mu. Some don't give a rat's butt either way.
Millisecond = ms
Microsecond = µs
Mega and giga are uppercase. 10 MW carbon-arc light haha. Or 10 GW carbon arc light if you're feeling fancy.
So how about "milliamp-hour"? The only word that is derived from a name is Ampere. So it would be abbreviated mAh.
Miles per hour = mph, all-wheel drive = awd and so on and on and on hahaha...
That's my imponderable for the day.
EDIT: I forgot one, "decibel." It's abbreviated dB because a "Bel" is the base unit of measurement. According to this article on Wikipedia:
"A decibel is one tenth of a bel (B (approximately 1.6 km) length of standard ). Devised by engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratory to quantify the reduction in audio level over a 1 miletelephone cable, the bel was originally called the transmission unit or TU, but was renamed in 1923 or 1924 in honor of the Bell System's founder and telecommunications pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. In many situations, however, the bel proved inconveniently large, so the decibel has become more common."
When terms come from a proper name, we spell them out in lowercase. 10 volts, 20 newton-meters... Rudolph Diesel invented it, but it's a diesel engine. When abbreviating, we use the uppercase. 10 V, 20 Nm, etc.
Ampere, Volt, Watt, Weber... all people's names.
How about kilo, mega, giga...? The rules are a bit hazier here. Usually, milli and kilo are abbreviated with a lowercase "m" and "k" respectively. It's a 10 kW dummy load or an LED that requires 100 mA of current. Micro is abbreviated with the Greek letter mu, or µ. Some engineers make a super-big deal about not using a lowercase "u" instead, and insist on the usage of mu. Some don't give a rat's butt either way.
Millisecond = ms
Microsecond = µs
Mega and giga are uppercase. 10 MW carbon-arc light haha. Or 10 GW carbon arc light if you're feeling fancy.
So how about "milliamp-hour"? The only word that is derived from a name is Ampere. So it would be abbreviated mAh.
Miles per hour = mph, all-wheel drive = awd and so on and on and on hahaha...
That's my imponderable for the day.
EDIT: I forgot one, "decibel." It's abbreviated dB because a "Bel" is the base unit of measurement. According to this article on Wikipedia:
"A decibel is one tenth of a bel (B (approximately 1.6 km) length of standard ). Devised by engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratory to quantify the reduction in audio level over a 1 miletelephone cable, the bel was originally called the transmission unit or TU, but was renamed in 1923 or 1924 in honor of the Bell System's founder and telecommunications pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. In many situations, however, the bel proved inconveniently large, so the decibel has become more common."
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