[cruffle_duffle]

It makes sense when you look at that the number as a count of “junk” floating around. Higher number, more junk. More junk==less clean.

The fun backwards measurement is always AWG. Smaller number means thicker wire. Larger number means thinner wire.

[gothroach]

I absolutely love how once things get down to 1 AWG they realized they had a problem and just started adding zeros. Then that got a bit silly, so when they reached 4/0 AWG they switched to KCMIL measurements and the numbers start going up.