One Thousand Million ≠ One Billion

[irishmaestro]

America and American usage is a bundle of stupidities, to paraphrase Anne Frank. Like the number '1,000,000,000', for example. In the early twentieth century, every country but America considered that number to be either 'a thousand million' or the then slightly archaic 'a milliard'. The idea was that a billion was a million squared, a trillion

Comments

[irishmaestro]

This is LJ, matey. What other forum is there for the useless, banal and trivial? =P

[b1itz_lunar]

I can think of one!

This is interesting btw, I have always known as 1 billion = 1,000,000,000 my whole life. Thanks for opening my eyes! I wonder if there are any billionaires in the world as according to usage in the United Kingdom... cuz that's a huuueeg number.

[banjofella]

Numbers.

Re:

[irishmaestro]

Yes. I know. *New York accent* Want to fight about it? =P

[1_5_15671]

"A thousand million" is unwieldy and "milliard" is a Eurotrash word.

And I've grown up with 1^9 = billion; 1^12 = trillion my whole life. In standard modern English, that's just how it is.

It does make for confusing transitions into French and German, but as long as I remember en:billion = fr:milliard, I can get by. It's pretty rare that I have to refer to a number larger than 10^9 in any foreign language, let alone 10^12.

十億, 一兆

[irishmaestro]

The only countries (apart from Brazil and Greece) that actually use 10^9 as a billion are English-speaking. The rest use the so-called 'long billion'.

[1_5_15671]

Oh yeah, from a Fidel Castro rant in 1999:But is the balloon that continues inflating the only threat and the only speculative gamble? Another phenomenon that is reaching ever more fabulous and uncontrollable proportions is that of speculative operations involving currencies. These operations now represent a minimum of a trillion dollars a day. Some claim it to be 1.5 trillion. Scarcely 14 years ago, this figure was only 150 billion dollars a year. There could be confusion regarding the figures. It is difficult to express them, and even more so to translate them from English to Spanish. What we call a billion in Spanish, that is, a million million, is a trillion in North American English. On the other hand, a billion in North American English is a thousand million in Spanish. Now they have come up with the milliard, which means a thousand million in both Spanish and English. These language difficulties demonstrate how difficult it is to follow and comprehend the fabulous figures that reflect the degree of speculation in the current