He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
(And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)
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"
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.
¿Que es un millón? Mil miles.
¿Que es un billón? Un millón de millones.
¿Que es un semillón? ???
Una semilla muy grande.
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).
2 commas = "Millions"
3 commas = "Billions"
4 commas = ...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.
10000^1 = 万 10000^2 = 億 10000^3 = 兆 10000^4 = 京
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.
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.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_milliardaires_du_mon...
imagine discovering mega- giga- tera- then not mentioning them
Why didn't this principle win?
(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
"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.
flysand7•2d ago
gpderetta•4h ago
edit: can't spell
Wilder7977•4h ago
ginko•4h ago
belchiorb•4h ago
tiagod•1h ago
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.
solstice•4h ago
Chinese:
Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...adornKey•4h ago
JdeBP•4h ago
ripe•2h ago
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).
kaliszad•4h ago
scotty79•4h ago
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...
solstice•2h ago
ozgung•3h ago
fsniper•3h ago
piva00•3h ago
luismedel•3h ago
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).
tiagod•1h ago
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.