Quoting Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>:
> > I suppose the "extreme" multiple one hears alot of is picofarads.
>
> I can't say I hear that particularly often.
You might not have taken as many electronics courses as I have. :)
A big multiple I hear of with some frequency is terajoule.
> > I've never
> > seen deka- except in lists of prefixes. Deci- and centi- are common
> > with metre
> > and litre, but rarely if ever used with anything else. Hecto- is
> > pretty much
> > restricted to hectogram (usually shortened to just 'hekto' - kilogram
> > similarly
> > becomes 'kilo'), hectare, and hectolitre, altho you sometimes hear of
> > hectopascals too.
>
> Before computers, I would've said mega- and giga- were used exclusively
> with litres, and then almost only when talking about reservoirs.
Let's not forget megatons of TNT equivalents wrt nuclear weapons.
Reservoirs capacities are here usually given in m^3 or km^3.
> > The really evil Swedish unit is the _mil_, or metric mile, of 10km.
> > It's just
> > asking for evil mistranslations.
>
> Henrik:
> > If course 'pound' (de: Pfund, nl: pond) is also exactly 500g in
> > Germany and the Netherlands and presumable in many other countries
> > that are not Great Britain for instance.
>
> I think you missed that one---a mil in Australia is a millimetre or
> millilitre.
I'd hope that's with a short /i/, tho. Swedish mil is [mi:l].
Andreas