Big numbers

Question

The news has been full of large numbers in the last few days. I was taught as a child (1950s) that 'billion' was a million millions, and 'trillion' was a million billions. My OED (2nd ed., 1989) gives
Billion

1. orig. and still commonly in Great Britain: A million millions (=U.S. trillion)

2. In U.S., and increasingly in Britain: A thousand millionsMilliard
A thousand millions
Trillion
The third power of a million; a million billions, i.e. millions of millions. Also, orig. in France and local U.S., a thousand ?billions?, or 10^12 (i.e. the traditional English billion): this sense is now standard in the U.S. and is increasingly common in British usage.
I'm still not sure what a trillion is nowadays and that definition is unusually obscure. Will I now be universally misunderstood if I use the terms as I learnt them? Does anyone use 'milliard'?
Noel

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Does anyone use 'milliard'?[/nq]
Yes, in French that means "billion" (1,000,000,000)

Million is always one thousand thousand (1,000,000) and these days

Billion is nowadays always one thousand million (1,000,000,000)

Trillion is always one million million (1,000,000,000,000)

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]The news has been full of large numbers in the last few days. I was taught as a child (1950s) ... million; a million billions, i.e. millions of millions. Also, orig. in France and local U.S., a thousand ?billions?, or 10[/nq]^12 (i.e. the traditional English billion): this sense is now
[nq:1]standard in the U.S. and is increasingly common in British usage. I'm still not sure what a trillion is ... obscure. Will I now be universally misunderstood if I use the terms as I learnt them? Does anyone use 'milliard'?[/nq]
Foreigners?
I've always thought that the English system made much more sense than the American, both in logical sequencing and in the long term effects of inflation.
However, as a declining economic force, England - Britain, even, - must needs bow to the greater power of the US.
So, would the next one up from milliards be billiards? Or is that just an awful lot of *****?

New Marmite(TM): Not as thick! Not as dark! Not as te!

David - toro-danyo atcost uku fullstop co fullstop uk http://www.toro-danyo.uku.co.uk/

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]The news has been full of large numbers in the last few days. I was taught as a child (1950s) ... million; a million billions, i.e. millions of millions. Also, orig. in France and local U.S., a thousand ?billions?, or 10[/nq]^12 (i.e. the traditional English billion): this sense is now
[nq:1]standard in the U.S. and is increasingly common in British usage. I'm still not sure what a trillion is nowadays and that definition is unusually obscure. Will I now be universally misunderstood if I use the terms as I learnt them?[/nq]
'Fraid so. I doubt the next edition of OED will describe the original meaning as still common in Britain.
[nq:1]Does anyone use 'milliard'?[/nq]
I've heard it used in recent years a by a Russian. I assume he'd learned English from old text books. OED says "The term is now largely superseded by billion." The Wikipedia hit for Milliard says, however, that 'In financial markets, yard (derived from milliard) is still often used instead of "billion" in order to avoid ambiguity between "million" and "billion"'. I suppose people have to be extra careful when agreeing financial deals.

Phil C.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Milliard A thousand millions Does anyone use 'milliard'?[/nq]
[nq:1]Foreigners?[/nq]
...
[nq:1]So, would the next one up from milliards be billiards? Or is that just an awful lot of *****?[/nq]
That was really one of your better ones, David. I hope it's original.

Noel

Usenet · Answer

about: Big numbers
[nq:1]The news has been full of large numbers in the last few days. I was taught as a child (1950s) that 'billion' was a million millions, and 'trillion' was a million billions.[/nq]
Ah, but that was then, and this is now..
Due to varying definitions of "billion", etc, and increasing globalisation, eventually one standard definition had to be agreed upon, to avoid confusion and misinterpretation.
[nq:1]I'm still not sure what a trillion is nowadays and that definition is unusually obscure. Will I now be universally misunderstood if I use the terms as I learnt them? Does anyone use 'milliard'?[/nq]
We already often informally use 'k' (kilo) for 1000, and, conveniently, the symbol for mega- (M) is the same as that used for 'million'. Given that our computers have increasingly large hard disks, we're all pretty familiar with G/giga and T/tera as well (and I dare say peta- and so on soon enough), I don't see why, as we start to encounter scarily ever-larger numbers, we don't just use the SI prefixes for money as well (eg, $3T = "three tera-dollars")? These have clearly-defined meanings and so there is no risk of confusion.
David.

David M. Edinburgh, Scotland. (en,fr,(de) Please remove quotes not needed for context and interleave reply text *No-context, excess-quoted, slug-trailed, zero-content posts filtered.*

Usenet · Answer

At 15:22:29 on Sun, 12 Oct 2008, David M
(Email Removed) wrote in
[nq:1]We already often informally use 'k' (kilo) for 1000, and, conveniently, the symbol for mega- (M) is the same as ... money as well (eg, $3T = "three tera-dollars")? These have clearly-defined meanings and so there is no risk of confusion.[/nq]
Well, the "informal" use of K for 1000 very neatly demonstrates the problem with your proposal. If I applied for, and got, a job which was advertised at a salary of £30K, I would be somewhat miffed if I ended up with only £30,000 instead of £30,720! (Especially since any job that I applied for would be in the world of computing.)
If we follow your suggestion and simply redefine K as 1,000, M as 1,000,000 etc., it does rather echo the urban legend that Alabama legislated to change the value of pi to 3.

Molly Mockford
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety - Benjamin Franklin (My Reply-To address *is* valid, though may not remain so for ever.)

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]If we follow your suggestion and simply redefine K as 1,000, M as 1,000,000 etc., it does rather echo the urban legend that Alabama legislated to change the value of pi to 3.[/nq]
ISTR that certain manufacturers of disk drives have done just that with M. Once you get to G the discrepancy becomes even more significant, of course.

John Hall
"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]We already often informally use 'k' (kilo) for 1000, and, ... clearly-defined meanings and so there is no risk of confusion.[/nq]
[nq:1]Well, the "informal" use of K for 1000 very neatly demonstrates the problem with your proposal.[/nq]
Ah, but I didn't write 'K', I wrote 'k', and even clearly specified that I meant 'kilo', which is clearly defined as 10^3, as in kilogram.

Indeed, there does still exist some confusion caused when 'K' (note case) came into use to mean "1000-ish" (specifically, 1024, or 2^10, as you know) in binary computing terms. When computer memory and storage were still mostly counted in "kilobytes" (sic) the difference between 1000s and 1024s obviously wasn't deemed to be enormously significant, but now that orders of magnitude further up the scale are much more commonplace, the factor of error becomes considerable.
To avoid this confusion, new binary prefixes have been invented for use with binary quantities (such as computer memory), and the erroneous use of the standard decimal prefixes for this purpose is now discouraged (although adoption is being somewhat slow!).
Hence, for 1 KB (of memory) you should instead write 1 KiB (kibibyte), similarly, MiB/mebibyte, GiB/gibibyte, TiB/tebibyte, and so on. (The prefixes are formed by condensing the first part of kilo, mega, etc, with the first part of 'binary'.)
Note, however, that for whatever bizarre reason (1), hard disk manufacturers decided that when they wrote MB, GB, etc, they did mean decimal scale factors (multiples of 1000) and not binary ones (multiples of 1024), so MB, GB, etc, should still correctly be used there, rather than MiB, GiB, etc.
(1) probably because it meant they could use larger numbers and so make their disks seem larger than they really were.
[nq:1]If I applied for, and got, a job which was advertised at a salary of £30K, I would be somewhat ... only £30,000 instead of £30,720! (Especially since any job that I applied for would be in the world of computing.)[/nq]
But why would you be applying binary scales to monetary values, which are decimal? I think if you applied that logic, you wouldn't actually get the job ;-)
(A memory manufacturer might like your rationale (but I still doubt they'd pay you the difference), but a hard disk manufacturer (kB) or a network connectivity supplier (kbit), or a CPU company (kHz) definitely wouldn't be impressed!)
If we were being pedantic (and of course we are, because this is ucle) then surmising that 'K' = binary-kilo, because it is not written 'k' = decimal-kilo, would also indicate an error on the part of the writer, because 'K' (when it does not mean kelvin, which it clearly cannot here) should really be 'Ki' were it to mean what is now called 'kibi-'.
..which is why I expressly wrote 'k' in the first place! :-)
[nq:1]If we follow your suggestion and simply redefine K as 1,000, M as 1,000,000 etc., it does rather echo the urban legend that Alabama legislated to change the value of pi to 3.[/nq]
Hmmph. ;-)
But 'k' does* mean 1000, and 'Ki' *does mean 1024, so there's no redefining going on.. :-)
David.

David M. Edinburgh, Scotland. (en,fr,(de) Please remove quotes not needed for context and interleave reply text *No-context, excess-quoted, slug-trailed, zero-content posts filtered.*

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Ildhund wrote in uk.culture.language.english about: Big numbers[/nq]
[nq:2]The news has been full of large numbers in the ... was a million millions, and 'trillion' was a million billions.[/nq]
[nq:1]Ah, but that was then, and this is now.. Due to varying definitions of "billion", etc, and increasing globalisation, eventually one standard definition had to be agreed upon, to avoid confusion and misinterpretation.[/nq]
That was surely an admirable step to take. When was it taken, and who agreed upon this /standard/ definition?

Noel

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Due to varying definitions of "billion", etc, and increasing globalisation, eventually one standard definition had to be agreed upon, to avoid confusion and misinterpretation.[/nq]
[nq:1]That was surely an admirable step to take. When was it taken, and who agreed upon this /standard/ definition?[/nq]
Well, I honestly don't know. When I was at school in the 1980s, I'm pretty sure I recall reading somewhere (possibly outdated) that a billion was 10^12, but by the time I started paying any attention to financial news in the 1990s, I'm sure word had definitely got around that we were now using the same value as the USA, 10^9 (eg, the BBC would report, "the Government is to spend three billion that's three thousand million pounds on.." (although I may be imagining this particular example, I am sure that there were indeed frequent instances where the media went to some pain to explain what exactly was meant by 'billion')).
Mind you, at the same time, the world population figures were floating around at the 3 - 4 billion mark.. Probably when I was younger I didn't think through exactly what that meant (billion, schmillion..), although it's clear that the 10^9 value must have been meant even then..
According to a mostly-non-fictional encyclopaedia, the UK Government adopted the "short scale" value of 'billion' in 1974:

(word)
(the cited reference is to a recent newspaper article which merely notes this as an aside, not to a contemporary primary source)

I had assumed that this effect would have rippled around the world, in order to avoid confusion, but, according to the same Wikipedia article, it would appear that most non-English-speaking
European-language-speaking countries still use the "long scale" value (and that most non-European-language-speaking countries often tend to use their own counting systems).
Given that these are numbers in very specialist use (other than as $BIGNUM which we ordinary folk can really barely conceive of), I would imagine that anybody who does need to precisely and specifically refer to 10^9 or 10^12, etc, values would be very sure to make certain that all parties to the discussion knew exactly what was being referred to..

David M. Edinburgh, Scotland. (en,fr,(de) Please remove quotes not needed for context and interleave reply text *No-context, excess-quoted, slug-trailed, zero-content posts filtered.*

Big numbers

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