1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 109 (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both British and American English.
1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the long scale. This is one thousand times larger than the short scale billion, and equivalent to the short scale trillion. This is the historic definition of a billion in British English.
American English adopted the short scale definition from the French. The United Kingdom used the long scale billion until 1974, when 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; the long scale definition still enjoys some limited usage in the UK.
When I was little that was what people used to say but now we've caved to the US and it's a mere thousand million. In fairness there seems to be no logic to the naming system, if a hundred is ten to the second power and a thousand is the third, then why is the next power with a name the sixth? And then the ninth?I only recently learned that a billion is now considered a thousand million, I'd always been under the impression it was a million million.
those dodgy geezas never got back to me about buying us outCouldn't we put the brains of dissensus together and hatch a plan to make big buku dolla?
i don't think it's a proper number at all, unfixable - the regular fluctuations in the actual amount of dollars in their fortunes due to constantly wobbling share prices, currency & commodity values, properties etc would be bigger than our entire lifetime earningsMoney on that scale is like the number of stars in the milky way or something. Totally ungraspable.