If we want formal-sounding names like “decimal” for base 10, or “hexadecimal” for base 16, we might try to use the sources of the parts of those names. These sources are Latin and Greek.

Now we don’t live in ancient Rome nor Greece, so we might not have to do everything those languages do to express a number. We can mix Latin and Greek, too. The English launguage has been using Latin and Greek words for new inventions and scientific terms for more than a couple centuries. Because of this, many of the word parts from these languages are fairly easy to understand in English. The Greek word-part “tele” and the Latin word part “vision”, or the Greek word part “phone” are easy to understand. “Tele” means “far”, so any word that has “tele-” has something to do with distance. Television and telephones are devices that communicate pictures and sounds from afar.

We use the Greek word part “hexa” to impart the idea of sixfoldness in English. We know that a hexagon is a six-sided shape. The Latin word “decimal” communicates something to do with ten. When we put these parts together we get “hexadecimal”, meaning base 16. So we can use Greek words for the units and Latin for the tens place. We write these “backward”, meaning unit first, then decade, because that’s how the words like “hexadecimal” are arranged. Latin places the units ahead of the decades.

We don’t have to have perfectly-good Latin names (or Greek ones) for number bases, because we aren’t trying to make Latin words. We’re making new English words that help us talk about number bases. So we don’t have to do everything these older languages do to make actual Latin or Greek number names. Some of the other things Latin does with number names would be confusing in English, so we don’t do them!

Would this system work in languages other that English? It may. Breaking the rules of Latin and Greek may harm the sensibility of this system in other languages. Speakers of other languages might wonder why we don’t do everything older languages do, that might seem strange and confusing to them. It would be up to speakers in those other languages to produce their own names of bases; we won’t try to control them. In some languages, like Spanish, Italian, and French, speakers might possibly simply use actual Latin base names. This is an English-language website; we’ll focus on English-language solutions and let others choose as they wish.

So this is the system for number base names used on this website. A friend suggested the system for names up to base-99; I’ve continued the system through the thousands. For this reason, this system is called the Lamadrid system of base names. It looks like a good system, so we’re sticking with it!