this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

59587 readers
2940 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] hagelslager@feddit.nl 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it's influencing UK English these days as well.

[โ€“] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 0 points 4 months ago

These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it's simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:

British usage: Billion has meant 10^9^ in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.^[12]^^[13]^^[43]^^[15]^

Before the widespread use of billion for 10^9^, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.^[16]^ The long scale term milliard, for 10^9^, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.

I've never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.