In Spanish, why mil and millón are so similar?

January 3, 2017

Have you ever wondered why mil is very much like millón in Spanish? 10 or 100 have completely different words but suddenly, here you have two alike numbers follow. This is because the word millón came from an Italian word milione which was made by Italians based on mille (a thousand) with an Italian augmentative -one. And, originally, Latin language did not have a word for million, so Spanish started following Italians by adding Spanish augmentative -on to the mil to show something bigger than mil and we have millón now.

There are not a lot to talk about this, but it is a good example of a word with an augmentative without even realizing it, and I thought it was very interesting that Classical Latin did not have a word for million.