title: How to abbreviate large numbers in a i18n-friendly way?
body: <p>I want to "abbreviate" large numbers to make them human-readable, using abbreviations that are idiomatic for a given locale. For example, the number <code>16512</code> would become:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><code>"16.5k"</code> for <code>en-US</code> ("k" is short for the Metric prefix "thousand", as in "kilometer")</li>
  <li><code>"16,5тыс."</code> for <code>ru</code> ("тыс." is short for "тысяча", meaning "thousand" in Russian)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I'm not sure what to call this procedure I'm describing.</p>
  
  <p>Ruby on Rails has something similar to what I'm looking for called <a href="http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/NumberHelper.html#method-i-number_to_human" rel="noreferrer"><code>#number_to_human</code></a>, but it's not quite right -- it would return <code>"16.5 Thousand"</code> in my example above. I'm interested in <em>abbreviations</em> (and perhaps not all locales round things to the nearest thousand), not merely making strings human-readable.</p>
  
  <p>I'd be especially interested in a solution that works for JavaScript, but even the name of this procedure would be a huge help!</p>