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
<quote>
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 millions
Milliard
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.
</quote>
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

On Wed, 8 Oct 2008 13:04:10 +0100, "Ildhund"  wrote:

>Does anyone use 'milliard'?

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)

In article <gci7k2$s32$1@registered.motzarella.org>,
   Ildhund  wrote:
> 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
> <quote>
> 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 millions
> Milliard
> 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.
> </quote>
> 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'?

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 balls?

-- 
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/

On Wed, 8 Oct 2008 13:04:10 +0100, "Ildhund" 
wrote:

>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
><quote>
>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 millions
>Milliard
>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.
></quote>
>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?

'Fraid so. I doubt the next edition of OED will describe the original
meaning as still common in Britain.

>Does anyone use 'milliard'?

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"'. <Irony alert> I suppose people have to be
extra careful when agreeing financial deals.
-- 
Phil C.

"David" <nospam@nomaps.amnops.invalid> wrote in message 
news:4feb1e1d0fnospam@nomaps.amnops.invalid...
> In article <gci7k2$s32$1@registered.motzarella.org>,
>   Ildhund  wrote:
>> Milliard
>> A thousand millions
>> Does anyone use 'milliard'?
>
> Foreigners?
>
...
> So, would the next one up from milliards be billiards? Or is that 
> just an awful lot of balls?

That was really one of your better ones, David. I hope it's 
original.
-- 
Noel

Ildhund wrote in uk.culture.language.english 
 about: Big numbers 

> 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. 

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.


> 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'?

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) <-- corrections welcome]
*Please remove quotes not needed for context and interleave reply text*
*No-context, excess-quoted, slug-trailed, zero-content posts filtered.*

At 15:22:29 on Sun, 12 Oct 2008, David M 
<david@bogus.domain.dom.invalid> wrote in 
:

>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.

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.)

In article <uLEdrkWWzj8IFwv0@molly.mockford>,
 Molly Mockford  writes:
>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.

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)

Molly Mockford wrote in uk.culture.language.english 
> At 15:22:29 on Sun, 12 Oct 2008, David M 
><david@bogus.domain.dom.invalid> wrote in 
>
>>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.
>
> Well, the "informal" use of K for 1000 very neatly demonstrates the 
> problem with your proposal.  

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.


> 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.)

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! :-)


> 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.

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) <-- corrections welcome]
*Please remove quotes not needed for context and interleave reply text*
*No-context, excess-quoted, slug-trailed, zero-content posts filtered.*

David M wrote...
> Ildhund wrote in uk.culture.language.english about: Big numbers
>
>> 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.
>
> 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.

That was surely an admirable step to take. When was it taken, and 
who agreed upon this /standard/ definition?
-- 
Noel

Ildhund wrote in uk.culture.language.english 
> David M wrote...
>>
>> Due to varying definitions of "billion", etc, and increasing 
>> globalisation, eventually one standard definition had to be agreed 
>> upon, to avoid confusion and misinterpretation.
>
> That was surely an admirable step to take. When was it taken, and 
> who agreed upon this /standard/ definition?

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:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_(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) <-- corrections welcome]
*Please remove quotes not needed for context and interleave reply text*
*No-context, excess-quoted, slug-trailed, zero-content posts filtered.*

Question: do I have the names right in the following table?

In particular, are the "in old UK System" names correct?  
Are they all really old (no longer used)?  Are they just UK, 
or are/were they ever in use other places?  


 NAMED POWERS OF TEN and TWO
 (first rough draft)
 -Guy Macon <http://www.GuyMacon.com/>
 --------------------------------

 -   N/A      10E+36  N/A [01]           1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
 -   N/A      10E+33  decillion          1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
 -   N/A       2E+100 N/A                1 267 650 600 228 229 401 496 703 205 376
 -   N/A      10E+30  N/A [02]           1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
 -   N/A       2E+90  N/A                1 237 940 039 285 380 274 899 124 224 
 -   N/A      10E+27  octillion          1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
 Yb  Yobi-     2E+80  yottabinary        1 208 925 819 614 629 174 706 176
 Y   Yotta-   10E+24  septillion [03]    1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
 Zi  Zebi-     2E+70  zettabinary        1 180 591 620 717 411 303 424   
 Z   Zetta-   10E+21  sextillion         1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
 Ei  Exbi-     2E+60  exabinary          1 152 921 504 606 846 976      
 E   Exa-     10E+18  quintillion [04]   1 000 000 000 000 000 000
 Pi  Pebi-     2E+50  petabinary         1 125 899 906 842 624         
 P   Peta-    10E+15  quadrillion        1 000 000 000 000 000
 Ti  Tebi-     2E+40  terabinary         1 099 511 627 776            
 T   Tera-    10E+12  trillion [05]      1 000 000 000 000
 Gi  Gibi-     2E+30  gigabinary         1 073 741 824               
 G   Giga-    10E+09  billion [06]       1 000 000 000
 Mi  Mebi-     2E+20  megabinary         1 048 576                  
 M   Mega-    10E+06  million            1 000 000
 Ki  kibi-     2E+10  kilobinary         1 024                     
 k   kilo-    10E+03  thousand           1 000
 h   hecto-   10E+02  hundred            100
 da  deca-    10E+01  ten                10
 d   deci-    10E-1   tenth              0.1
 c   centi-   10E-2   hundredth          0.01
 m   milli-   10E-3   thousandth         0.001
 u   micro-   10E-6   millionth          0.000 001 (Note: Greek letter Mu, not lower case U.) 
 n   nano-    10E-9   billionth [07]     0.000 000 001
 p   pico-    10E-12  trillionth [08]    0.000 000 000 001
 f   femto-   10E-15  quadrillionth      0.000 000 000 000 001
 a   atto-    10E-18  quintillionth [09] 0.000 000 000 000 000 001
 z   zepto-   10E-21  sextillionth       0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001
 y   yocto-   10E-24  septillionth [10]  0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001
 -   N/A      10E-27  octillionth        0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001
 -   N/A      10E-30  N/A [11]           0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001
 -   N/A      10E-33  decillionth        0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001
 -   N/A      10E-36  N/A [12]           0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001

[01] sextillion    in old UK System
[02] quintillion   in old UK System
[03] quadrillion   in old UK System
[04] trillion      in old UK System
[05] billion       in old UK System
[06] milliard      in old UK System
[07] milliardh     in old UK System
[08] billionth     in old UK System
[09] trillionth    in old UK System
[10] quadrillionth in old UK System
[11] quintillionth in old UK System
[12] sextillionth  in old UK System

Note: vendeka, xenna, xenno, and vendeko are bogus.
Before you try using them, please read these pages:
[ http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/units.htm#prefix ]
[ http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/culture.htm#zillion ]
[ http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html ]
[ http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html ]


-- 
Guy Macon
<http://www.GuyMacon.com/>