Topic summary
Giga

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Giga-.
Giga- is derived from the Greek word γίγας (gígas), meaning "giant". The Oxford English Dictionary reports the earliest written use of giga in this sense to be in the Reports of the IUPAC 14th Conférence Internationale de Chimie in 1947: "The following prefixes to abbreviations for the names of units should be used: G giga 10×." However, it was already used in 1932 by the German organization Verband deutscher Elektrotechniker.