Last week, my pal Scott Simpson provided a helpful comparison to help envision what the purchase price of Tumblr actually meant. However, he can’t write such a beneficial companion piece to every news story. Enter Dictionary of Numbers, a tool which attempts to automatically provide context for large numbers.

A friend of mine, Glen Chiacchieri, has created a Chrome extension to help solve this problem: Dictionary of Numbers. It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets.

For instance, here’s what Dictionary of Numbers offers for last week’s story on Guantanamo Bay:

It’s no Cloud to Butt (thank you, Steven Frank, for that one), but it’s similarly entertaining.

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