Over the course of history, societies have developed their own number systems to suit their own needs. These days, most of the world shares a common base 10 system, but different regions still have their own significant magnitudes. Enter the crore and lakh and a major change on the part of YouTube India to start using those units instead of thousands and millions to count up views, subscribers, likes, and such.

We've been tipped about this change plenty in the past 24 hours from users in the subcontinent who've seen something like "17M views" turn into "1.7 crore views."

For those not familiar, lakh or sometimes lac is used to mean one hundred thousand (10⁵) while crore stands in for one hundred lakhs (that's 10 million or 10⁷).

Thousands are still used.

Some Asian numeral systems, including the Chinese and Japanese ones, mark significant units in factors of 10,000 all the way up to 10⁴⁴ (that's 10 septillion). YouTube in those languages uses those local units.

All of this is to say that it's nice to see platform recognition for a language that hundreds of millions of people use everyday.

Thanks: Gopinath, @imRishabhBaid, @kirankupradhan, Solomon, Vivek