2K1

[Drew Danielson]

Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>
> many newspapers use k for 'thousand' in reporting dollar figures
> (salaries, real estate offers/sales, etc.) in headlines.  the
> corresponding shortcut for 'million' is of course m.

In these cases, the unit is not elliptical - the convention is to
include the unit symbol, "$", as in $50K.

> this has been around for some time - exactly how long i don't
> know - and has been adopted in other abbreviated written contexts,
> and then into speech as well ("they're offering us 250k!").

Point taken.