He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.
"million of millions of dollars" or "ten to the twelfth dollars" or "one tera dollar" or even "one EEE twelve" (for programmers) will always be understood correctly, no matter which part of world listeners are from.
In science and engineering you'd rather use scientific notation anyway, and in math and CS notoriously only 3 numbers exist: 0, 1 and n.
This is the key piece of information for making sense of it. Ultimately the OP's insight is that the number-naming system used in the west is thousands based instead of millions based, but came to that by observing the number-naming outcomes instead of the source notation that led to it.
Also, I'm certainly not a US apologist, but I also don't see how the US using the short scale is a case of misunderstanding - it sounds like they just decided that it makes more sense that way (and I would agree, although maybe that's just because I'm used to it).
This is sufficiently confusing to people that every time I see a newspaper article mention something is a biljon of something they have to mention how much it is and remind readers to not confuse it with an American billion (that is only a miljard).
In most contexts when big numbers like those show up though the metric-system comes to the rescue, since things will be referred to as being a mega-something or giga-something etc anyway. That works great until Americans attempt to do it and get the letters wrong or use K instead of k or M instead of m that causes new confusion and then we're back at having to guess what something means depending on what side of the Atlantic it was written.
10000^1 = 万 10000^2 = 億 10000^3 = 兆 10000^4 = 京
These do converge I think at
10^12 = Short Trillion/Long Billion
Which makes for some non-frictionless translating since 10^6 and 10^9 are all in-between words, and 10^12 is not a commonly used number to count anything in everyday life.
With the exception of people over 70, the UK has pretty uniformly moved to the American system. All of our govt statistics, corporate finances info, day-to-day conversations involving billions refer to "one thousand million"
(And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)
When I talk Swedish I think in terms of long scale, 24 h clock, SI units.
When I talk English I think in terms of short scale, 12 h clock, imperial units.
It's like different cultural basis vectors.
Even in England itself people use different words to describe the same thing, causing confusion. In many other countries they speak completely different languages!
In the US it's all the same. As an Englishman it's remarkable to me that people in Boston and people in California are really not that different at all. Some may say it's boring, but it can't be denied how easy it makes business etc. So many of the problems I have at work are due to language. It's doubly difficult when you're talking with people with a different native tongue. Some things just don't translate and even if they do it adds overhead.
So, ultimately, it doesn't matter what Americans say or how much they've "misunderstood" English etc, what matters is that every single one of them understands the same billion, the same units of measurement, the same idioms etc.
Why didn't this principle win?
(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
I'm bilingual, I watch and read content in both Spanish (my native language) and English. Back in 2021, I heard that Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" had hit 1 billion views on YouTube. I loved that song back then.
I was really amazed, so I decided to check it out for myself. But to my surprise, the video said “1000 millones de vistas” (millón = million). Confused, I asked myself, “Why do they say the video hit one billion views if it only says one thousand million here?”
That’s when I figured out that billón doesn’t mean the same as billion.
And now, years later, I’m reading your blog post about your experience, and commenting on it in a language that’s not even my native one.
Chinese:
1 yi
10 shi
100 bai
1000 qian
10000 wan
10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand)
100 x 10000 bai wan (one million)
1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million)
1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million)
10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)
They write thousands just like in the U.S. system, with the same commas: 20,000. But beyond that, the "lakh" is 100k, the "crore" is 10M, and commas in written figures go in twos:
The population of Australia is about 2.8 crores: 2,80,00,000. The Delhi metro area is over 3.4 crores: 3,40,00,000.
They have more unique words for every 100-multiple unit after crore, to go along with the commas, but in everyday practice they don't use those terms. Instead, they go "long" on the crores. Thus, India's population is about 146 crores; the new Mumbai underground Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ line will cost ₹21,000 crore.
When reporting foreign money, they use the U.S. system with millions and billions as usual: ₹21,000 crore is parenthesized (US$2.5 billion).
myriad scale - based on 10.000
mid-scale - based on 10⁸
long scale - based on doubling of exponent (4, 8, 16, 32, ..)https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...
But more and more people use "billions" (not billardo, which is our own term for it). The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).
I sometimes say (in Portuguese) "dez kapa".
It's just slang. Language changes a lot faster than you realise, and a lot of words that are "normal" to you would illicit the same response before you were born.
AFAIK the exception is the finance world, where I believe B stands for the short scale for a long time, and $1B has been used in newspapers for a long time too due to globalisation of the economy.
I’m
If it happens in Spanish, it probably happens in most of Europe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44509534
What’s interesting is that the long scale actually matches the literal Latin root more closely, so in a way, the “modern” short scale is less intuitive linguistically, but more practical numerically.
¿Que es un millón? Mil miles.
¿Que es un billón? Un millón de millones.
¿Que es un semillón? ???
Una semilla muy grande.
This is a fantastic educational song designed to teach children how big a billion is by using examples involving hamburgers. I promise it will be the best 80's educational rap you hear all day.
imagine discovering mega- giga- tera- then not mentioning them
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_milliardaires_du_mon...
Guess what? Some people (70-80% of the world) speak other languages.
That makes millionaire and billionaire about as unenglish as milliardaire, I think it just doesn't sound weird to you because you see them more often.
"If it is objected that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation"
The US leading the way in a sensible measuring system.
I did however not find the quote via Google search. Can you share the source?
EDIT: I have found the source! https://archive.org/details/sim_economist_1943-11-06_145_522...
The Economist, November 6, 1943:
>The “Billion”
>This week, for the first time, the note circulation is in excess of £1,000 million. There is, of course, very little real difference between £999 million and £1,001 million—apart from a difficulty for the compositor who works within a narrow column. And yet there is a great psychological barrier, and the setting-down of that extra digit, with its comma following, seems to symbolise the breaking of fresh ground. The totals of revenue and expenditure have, of course, been in ten figures almost ever since the beginning of the war, and the total of the national debt—a rather shadowy notion anyhow—is well into eleven. With the line crossed by a third familiar statistic it is natural to ask what this magnitude of 1,000 million is to be called. There is no word native to these islands. The continental word “milliard” was in some use some years ago, but has not been used very much recently. Well over half the English-speaking peoples, however, use “billion” to mean a thousand million, and if it is objected to this usage that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation. For some time past, The Economist has been using “billion” in American contexts with the American meaning—i.e:, one thousand million. It now seems convenient to extend that usage to British and foreign contexts. Henceforward, in these columns, in the absence of specific indication to the contrary, “billion” means 1 and nine 0’s.
