One million (1,000,000), or one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001. The word is derived from the early Italian millione (milione in modern Italian), from mille, "thousand", plus the augmentative suffix -one. It is commonly abbreviated in British English as m (not to be confused with the metric prefix "m", milli, for , or with metre), M, MM ("thousand thousands", from Latin "Mille"; not to be confused with the Roman numeral = 2,000), mm (not to be confused with millimetre), or mn in financial contexts. In scientific notation, it is written as or 106. Physical quantities can also be expressed using the SI prefix mega (M), when dealing with SI units; for example, 1 megawatt (1 MW) equals 1,000,000 watts. The meaning of the word "million" is common to the short scale and long scale numbering systems, unlike the larger numbers, which have different names in the two systems. The million is sometimes used in the English language as a metaphor for a very large number, as in "Not in a million years" and "You're one in a million", or a hyperbole, as in "I've walked a million miles" and "You've asked a million-dollar question". 1,000,000 is also the square of 1000 and also the cube of 100. Visualizing one million Even though it is often stressed that counting to precisely a million would be an exceedingly tedious task due to the time and concentration required, there are many ways to bring the number "down to size" in approximate quantities, ignoring irregularities or packing effects. Information: Not counting spaces, the text printed on 136 pages of an Encyclopædia Britannica, or 600 pages of pulp paperback fiction contains approximately one million characters. Length: There are one million millimetres in a kilometre, and roughly a million sixteenths of an inch in a mile (1 sixteenth = 0.0625). A typical car tire might rotate a million times in a trip, while the engine would do several times that number of revolutions. Fingers: If the width of a human finger is , then a million fingers lined up would cover a distance of . If a person walks at a speed of , it would take them approximately five and a half hours to reach the end of the fingers. Area: A square a thousand objects or units on a side contains a million such objects or square units,