The Aegean numerals of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations included a single unit to denote tens of thousands. It was written with a symbol composed of a circle with four dashes ?. In Classical Greek numerals, a myriad was written as a capital mu: Μ, as lower case letters did not exist in Ancient Greece. To distinguish this numeral from letters, it was sometimes given an overbar:. Multiples were written above this sign, so that for example would equal 4,582×10,000 or 45,820,000. The etymology of the wordmyriad itself is uncertain: it has been variously connected to PIE*meu- in reference to the waves of the sea and to Greek myrmex in reference to their swarms. The largest number named in Ancient Greek was the myriad myriad or hundred million. In his Sand Reckoner, Archimedes of Syracuse used this quantity as the basis for a numeration system of large powers of ten, which he used to count grains of sand.
Usage
In English, myriad is most commonly used to mean "some large but unspecified number". It may be either an adjective or a noun: both "there are myriad people outside" and "there is a myriad of people outside" are in use. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes that confusion over the use of myriad as a noun "seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective... however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton and Thoreau, and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English." "Myriad" is also infrequently used in English as the specific number 10,000. Owing to the possible confusion with the generic meaning of "large quantity", however, this is generally restricted to translation of other languages like ancient Greek, Chinese, and Hindi where numbers may be grouped into sets of 10,000. Such use permits the translator to remain closer to the original text and avoid repeated and unwieldy mentions of "tens of thousands": for example, "the original number of the crews supplied by the several nations I find to have been twenty-four myriads" and "What is the distance between one bridge and another? Twelve myriads of parasangs".
Europe
Most European languages include variations of "myriad" with similar meanings to the English word. Additionally, the prefixmyria- indicating multiplication times tenthousand, was part of the original metric system adopted by France in 1795. Although it was not retained after the 11th CGPM conference in 1960, myriameter is sometimes still encountered as a translation of the Scandinavian mile of, or in some classifications of wavelengths as the adjective myriametric. The myriagramme was a French approximation of the avoirdupoisquartier of and the myriaton appears in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novel trilogy. In Modern Greek, the word "myriad" is rarely used to denote 10,000, but a million is ekatommyrio and a thousand million is disekatommyrio.
In East Asia, the traditionalnumeral systems of China, Korea, and Japan are all decimal-based but grouped into ten thousands rather than thousands. The character for myriad is in traditional script and in simplified form in both mainland China and Japan. The pronunciation varies within China and abroad: wàn, wan5, bān, maan6, man, and vạn. Vietnam is peculiar within the Sinosphere in largely rejecting Chinese numerals in favor of its own: vạn is less common than the native mười nghìn and its numerals are grouped in threes. Because of this grouping into fours, higher orders of numbers are provided by the powers of 10,000 rather than 1,000: In China, 10,0002 was in ancient texts but is now called and sometimes written as 1,0000,0000; 10,0003 is 1,0000,0000,0000 or ; 10,0004 is 1,0000,0000,0000,0000 or ; and so on. Conversely, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean generally do not have native words for powers of one thousand: what is called "one million" in English is "100萬" in the Sinosphere, and "one billion" in English is "十億" or "十萬萬" in the Sinosphere. Unusually, Vietnam employs its former translation of 兆, một triệu, to mean 1,000,000 rather than the Chinese figure. Similarly, the PRC government has adapted the word 兆 to mean the scientific prefix mega-, but transliterations are used instead for giga-, tera-, and other larger prefixes. This has caused confusion in areas closely related to the PRC such as Hong Kong and Macau, where 兆 is still largely used to mean 10,0003. 萬 and 万 are also frequently employed colloquially in expressions, clichés, and chengyu in the senses of "vast", "numerous", "numberless", and "infinite". A skeleton key is a , the emperor was the "lord of myriad chariots", the Great Wall is called , Zhu Xi's statement had the sense of supporting greater empiricism in Chinese philosophy, and Ha Qiongwen's popular 1959 propaganda poster, meaning "Long live Chairman Mao", literally reads as " Chairman Mao 10,000 years old".
