6-517: Billion is a name for a large number. It may refer specifically to: Billion may also refer to: Billion Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions: American English adopted the short scale definition from the French (it enjoyed usage in France at the time, alongside the long-scale definition). The United Kingdom used the long scale billion until 1974, when
12-508: A billion came to denote a thousand million (10 ), a trillion became a million million (10 ), and so on. This new convention was adopted in the United States in the 19th century, but Britain retained the original long scale use. France, in turn, reverted to the long scale in 1948. In Britain, however, under the influence of American usage, the short scale came to be increasingly used. In 1974, Prime Minister Harold Wilson confirmed that
18-524: Is extremely rare in English, but words similar to it are very common in other European languages. For example, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew (Asia), Hungarian, Italian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (although the expression mil milhões — a thousand million — is far more common), Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish (although
24-486: The expression mil millones — a thousand million — is far more common), Swedish, Tajik, Turkish, Ukrainian and Uzbek — use milliard , or a related word, for the short scale billion, and billion (or a related word) for the long scale billion. Thus for these languages billion is a thousand times as large as the modern English billion. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the word billion
30-540: The government officially switched to the short scale, but since the 1950s the short scale had already been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism. Moreover even in 1941, Churchill remarked "For all practical financial purposes a billion represents one thousand millions...". Other countries use the word billion (or words cognate to it) to denote either the long scale or short scale billion. (For details, see Long and short scales § Current usage .) Milliard , another term for one thousand million,
36-482: Was formed in the 16th century (from million and the prefix bi- , "two"), meaning the second power of a million (1,000,000 = 10 ). This long scale definition was similarly applied to trillion , quadrillion and so on. The words were originally Latin, and entered English around the end of the 17th century. Later, French arithmeticians changed the words' meanings, adopting the short scale definition whereby three zeros rather than six were added at each step, so
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