Lakh

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A lakh (Hindi/Nepali : लाख, Gujarati : લાખ, Urdu: لکھ, Bengali: লাখ, Telugu : లక్ష, Tamil : இலட்சம்) is a unit in the Indian numbering system, widely used both in official and other contexts in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Pakistan. It was transliterated in Chinese Buddhism works as 洛叉 (Mandarin: luòchā, Japanese: rakusha). One lakh is equal to a hundred thousand (10⁵). A hundred lakhs make a crore or ten million. The word is particularly notable because it is used almost exclusively in English language articles written for Indian audiences (as opposed to writing "hundred thousand").

This system of measurement also introduces separators into numbers in a place that is different from that which is common in certain other number systems. For example, 3 million (30 lakh) would be written as 30,00,000 instead of 3,000,000.

The Mumbai underworld slang for Lakh is peti.

Equivalent spellings of the word in English are lac and plural forms lacs, lakhs. Variants of the word are laksha in Telugu and Kannada, lectcham in Tamil or laksham in Malayalam. The variant laksha should not be confused with "lakshya", which means goal.

Among Gaudiya Vaishnavas, "one lakh" is the customary daily quota of harināma-japa (chanting lord Hari's names) [1].

The word lakh (and its variants) are derived from Sanskrit word laksha. Laksha denoted hundred thousand in the ancient Indian numbering system which has separate terms for all powers of ten from 10⁰ till 10¹⁷.