What is a billion? HS2.

I'm sure that in my days a billion used to be a million millions, as a million is a thousand thousands.
Since it is now a thousand millions I wondered if that had always been the case.
One hundred billion trips off the tongue quickly and easily but I say it long--hand.... one hundred thousand million. When you say it like that it sounds one hell of a lot more money !

 

It changed in the 1970s. Used to be a million million but changed to a thousand million.

 

It’s 10 DUP votes in support of a tory government, paid for by taxpayer!

 

You learn summat new everyday! Always been a thousand million to me.

 

Ours was bigger theirs was smaller. We changed to match them.

 

And me.

 

Strange that the United States with their utter determination to stick with imperial and other weird measures like bushels, short tones and weird gallons actually presented something sensible.

With every n3 having a name - nano, pico, milli, kilo, etc in metric - for the americans to notice we didn't have a sensible differenciating nomenclature for a thousand million seems counter intuitive.

Maybe the french actually called a thousand million a billion as well and we swapped when we went metric. That would make more sense to me.

 

I can't see it making any difference to me anytime soon.

 

1 × 10*9

 

The French would have called a thousand million a milliard - as would the British before the 1970s, I think.

Essentially one scale works by changing the prefix every thousand and the other every million. The long one sticks 'iards' in between the 'ions' So you have million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion etc in the long scale or million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion etc in the short scale. The first was commonly used in Europe, the latter in the USA. Now pretty much everybody uses the second (at least in English).

 

= 90
Whereas 1 x 10^9 = 1bn ......I think

10 x 10 = 100 (ten tens = one hundred)
100 x 100 = 10 000 (one hundred hundreds = ten thousand
1 000 x 1 000 = 1 000 000 (one thousand thousands = one million)
1 000 000 x 1 000 = 1 000 000 000 (one thousand millions = one billion)
1 000 000 x 1 000 000 = 1 000 000 000 000 (one million millions = one trillion - the old fashioned billion)

 

They will probably change the definition again to try and make it look cheaper

 

As you can see I didn’t take writing big numbers in standard form all that seriously!

 

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/campaigning/past-campaigns/budget/how-much-is-a-billion.html

 

The UK government has been using the American meaning of billion since 1974 for the numbers it gives out.

 

And this is another reason for Brexit --------- let's take back control...... of the numbers!!!!!