What to Call the Very Rich: Millionaires, Vranaires, Okuaires, Billionaires and Lakhlakhaires
Take a look at this exchange between Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg in a recent Democratic Primary debate:
“So, the mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave, full of crystals, and served $900-a-bottle wine,” she said. “Think about who comes to that.”
“We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States,” she added. “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.”
Buttigieg pushed back, noting (as he has before) that he has the smallest net worth of anyone running. “I’m literally the only person on this stage who is not a millionaire or a billionaire,” he said. By Warren’s logic, Buttigieg continued, Warren herself was part of the problem.
“Now, supposing you went home and felt the holiday spirit—I know this isn’t likely, but stay with me—and decided to go on peteforamerica.com and gave the maximum allowable by law, $2,800,” he said. “Would that pollute my campaign because it came from a wealthy person?”
Elizabeth Warren’s is handicapped in this exchange by two facts. First, inflation over the past century makes it so “millionaire” doesn’t mean as much as it once did—and “multimillionaire” could mean someone who has $2 million, which also doesn’t mean as much as it once did. Second, English is missing convenient, noncompound words for many of the relevant powers of ten. If one thinks that while a million dollars makes one rich, that it takes ten million dollars to make someone filthy rich, talking of ten-millionaires not only lacks punch, it is confusing to those who can’t here the different between ten millionaires and ten-millionaires.
Fortunately, Wikipedia provides articles on many of the key powers of ten that detail names for these powers of ten in other languages that can be pressed into service. (These Wikipedia articles also give many fun facts about numbers in between these powers of ten.) Let me give the Wikipedia links and the relevant passages Wikipedia bolding with my own:
In India, Pakistan and South Asia, one hundred thousand is called a lakh, and is written as 1,00,000. The Thai, Lao, Khmer and Vietnamese languages also have separate words for this number: แสน, ແສນ, សែន [saen] and ức respectively. The Malagasy word is hetsy[1].
In South Asia, it is known as the crore.
In Cyrillic numerals, it is known as the vran (вран - raven).
East Asian languages treat 100,000,000 as a counting unit, significant as the square of a myriad, also a counting unit. In Chinese, Korean, and Japanese respectively it is (simplified Chinese: 亿; traditional Chinese: 億; pinyin: yì) (or Chinese: 萬萬; pinyin: wànwàn in ancient texts), eok (억/億) and oku (億). These languages do not have single words for a thousand to the second, third, fifth power, etc.
(“Million, “billion” and “trillion” are perfectly good words, and in recent years the British usage for “billion” and “trillion” have begun converging toward the American usage. For 10,000, I have always liked the word “myriad.”)
Making some editorial choices, let me then propose the following names, including the traditional ones:
$1,000,000: millionaire
$10,000,000: vranaire
$100,000,000: okuaire
$1,000,000,000: billionaire
$10,000,000,000: lakhlakhaire
$100,000,000,000: hundred-billionaire
$1,000,000,000,000: trillionaire
Notes on roads taken and not taken:
“croraire” would be hard to pronounce; hence I prefer “vranaire.”
I have spent a lot of time in Japan, so I am drawn to the Japanese word for 100,000,000.
Wikipedia gives no single noncompound word for 10,000,000,000. But using “lakh,” it is possible to make a compound term that is only two syllables and is quite distinctive and memorable. (10,000,000,000 = 100,000 x 100,000. Here is a link for the pronunciation of lakh.
I am at a loss to find a noncompound word for 100,000,000,000, but at least “hundred-billionaires” is distinguishable in speech from “one hundred billionaires.”
If you want to know what these various categories of rich folks are like, I highly recommend the book Richistan, by Robert Frank, about what it is like to be very rich. It makes a difference which power of ten one has exceeded! It is very, very different to be an okuaire than to be a vranaire. A vranaire has enough to retire early in comfort and have a nice house in any city, but having almost anything one selfishly desires that money can buy requires being at least an okuaire. And it is not hard to have philanthropic desires or desires for power to affect human history that would easily require being a billionaire or lakhlakhaire.
As for millionaires, a tenured economics professor who has been required by their college or university to save 15% of their salary for retirement should at a certain age be a millionaire on paper unless they have had bad luck.
Related post: New Words for a New Year