1,000,000,000
- Thread starter All Seeing Eye
- Start date
You've been Americanized Tachyon.
I think it came with the decimalisation of the 1970s.
It all started with the move to SI units in schools (the newton-meter over the foot-pound), which in turn brought in the scale prefixes kilo- mega- giga- from europe and america.
This became relevant in the 1980s, as the computer age came along and words like mega-byte and mega-hertz came into common language, there needed to be a numerical consistency to these words.
And since most computer chips were exports from the USA, we got their definition of billions.
That's how I've always interpreted it anyway. I'm probably a mile off... (a british mile, that is)
I think it came with the decimalisation of the 1970s.
It all started with the move to SI units in schools (the newton-meter over the foot-pound), which in turn brought in the scale prefixes kilo- mega- giga- from europe and america.
This became relevant in the 1980s, as the computer age came along and words like mega-byte and mega-hertz came into common language, there needed to be a numerical consistency to these words.
And since most computer chips were exports from the USA, we got their definition of billions.
That's how I've always interpreted it anyway. I'm probably a mile off... (a british mile, that is)
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It changed in the 70s.
I do like the word Milliard, though.
I do like the word Milliard, though.
Rii
Rear Admiral
I'm Australian and so far as I'm concerned "jail" is spelt "jail", not "gaol" as official documents would have me believe.
The misleading characterisation of the twelve-zero billion as the "British billion" is covered in the Wikipedia article linked earlier in the thread.
The British billion used to be 1,000,000,000,000, ie a million million, on the logic that
10 10's are 100
*cough* ignoring casually 1000...
1000 1000's are a million,
so a million millions are a billion.
The US called 1,000,000,000 ie a thousand million, a billion, on the logic that
1000 1000s are a million
so 1000 million is a billion,
1000 billion is a trillion, etc.
But once the world became truly globalised and these sort of differences began to create genuine problems in trade, the world began to standardise towards the US billion, ie 1 billion = a thousand million.
The same thing happens higher up the chain, too. A 'British trillion' was a billion billions, but we now use the 'American trillion', a thousand billion.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
At one time in England, Tachyon, we didn't have a 'w'. We simply wrote 'uu'.
At one time, we didn't have an 'f', because we had the sound of 'v'
At one time there was no 'v' either. We just had two pronunciations of 'u'.
At one time, we didn't have a 'k', because 'c' was enough to represent both sounds.
And neither did we have a 'j', because we made do with 'i' and 'g'.
Our alphabet was a lot smaller in those days. That would explain 'gail' but not 'gaol'.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Échelles_longue_et_courte#Noms_des_grandes_puissances_de_10
It's in French but the table is easily understandable.
It's in French but the table is easily understandable.
Rii
Rear Admiral
Apparently it comes from the Norman "gaiole". We certainly caught it via Britain, alas despite all efforts to eradicate the disease it continues to persist in certain circles.
You've never seen that spelling? Do you read any British books published before about 1950? Most will use the British spelling, the Americanised 'jail' only came into accepted use by British publishers relatively recently.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Read books? what does that involve then? what is this thing you call a book?
Books are like websites printed out on paper.
There are also "libraries" which are like the internet on paper.
There are also "libraries" which are like the internet on paper.
Read books? what does that involve then? what is this thing you call a book?
Ballad of Reading Gaol, anyone? Besides me, that is. It was pretty interesting, actually.
I knew gaol and jail meant the same thing (I'm American, in case you can't tell) but I was probably in my 20s before I realized they were pronounced the same way. Ah, English...
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
This thread makes Carl Sagan sad. 
As far as i've always been aware, 1 Billion is written as 1,000,000,000 and 1 Trillion has been written as 1,000,000,000,000.
But a little internet search and some discussion on other boards has brought to my attention the fact that everyone seems to think that in the UK and Europe that 1 Billion is written as 1,000,000,000,000.
Can anyone explain to me why that is? as far as i'm concerned and everyone I know is concerned 12 zeros is a Trillion not a Billion so what the heck is going on?
The definitive answer is that anything you hear on television and/or read in newspapers will be using the short scale, where a billion is 10^9 (10 to the power 9), in both the UK and the US (and, indeed, Australia).
So, there are 6,600,000,000 (6.6 billion) people on Planet Earth, and the G20 bailout is $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion).
It used to be that in the British Empire (i.e. now Commonwealth English-speaking countries) a billion was a million million (and indeed a trillion was a billion billion, not 1000 1000 million), but this has been quietly phased out since about the 1970s, which is when people started using these terms more in common usage for financial matters.
There aren't many quantities that reach these dizzy heights anyway, so it's never been a huge problem in common use that the two were different, scientists use S.I. prefixes and/or standard form anyway (i.e. 10GW or 1x10^9 W).
The only spanner in the works is that other languages use a word derivations in a different way, as we can see from the foreign-language examples in posts before mine.
