4 ms·

This isn't a very serious comment, but it drives me bonkers how many monikers there are for a million. Now I have to prep my brain for the mln floating around.

This isn't a very serious comment, but it drives me bonkers how many monikers there are for a million. Now I have to prep my brain for the mln floating around. lol

Scoundreller 4y ago
Then in French they say “milliard” for billion. And billiard for trillion. Throws me off.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  I think the old style British Billion is a million million as well, so the meaning depends on how old the text is.
- krisoft 4y ago
  Wait until you learn that the French has a different word for many other concepts too! Crazy! Why can't they just use plain English nobody knows. \s
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > Wait until you learn that the French has a different word for many other concepts too! But it gets more interesting, they use the same words (or a very similar one) as in English to express different concepts. "Crier" sounds like cry, but it means "to scream".
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Even worse, there are "English sounding words" that mean things in French that don't exist and wouldn't make sense in English. E.g pressing is a dry cleaner, dressing is a wardrobe, footing is jogging.
    - baggy_trough 4y ago
      Like 'cry out'.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Oh god, so it wasn't just in russian. This made me go down this rabbithole to finally figure out what's up. I got curious about the details, and, turns out, it is related to whether the short scale or long scale system is used.[0] Short scale is the traditional million-billion-trillion-etc. Long scale is million-milliard-billion-billiard-etc. It isn't just naming for the same thing, as billion would actually have different power across those systems (power of 9 vs power of 12). Looks like both russia and france got their own variations of it. Russia uses short scale, but swapped the name for billion to milliard. While francophone, scandinavian, and a few other countries tend to use long scale. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
  - Hanschri 4y ago
    As a Norwegian I can confirm it's confusing when reading numbers written in English. In Norway we use million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion, trilliard. But for a number such as '3 milliarder', one often writes '3.000 millioner' instead. Exactly why I don't know, but I would guess it has something to do with more accurately reflecting the size of the number. It might not be as clear that the number is 1000x the size with a simple change in the end of the word. The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion, after all. Speaking of confusion about numbers, just wait until you see how different countries divide up large numbers. Some countries, such as Norway write one million as 1.000.000,00 while others write it as 1,000,000.00.
  - inawarminister 4y ago
    interestingly, Malaysia uses British/American style short scales (juta, biliun, triliun) while Indonesia uses short scale... but still retaining the old Dutch longscale just for billion (juta, milyar, triliun...) There might be other languages where this occur as well, not just Russian and Indonesian.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  In Italian it is milione/miliardo/bilione, when translating it is easy to make a mistake between the Italian bilione (10^12) and the English billion (10^9).
- CountSessine 4y ago
  This is the difference between the long number system and the short number system: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales The long system makes vastly more sense, but in the English world we use the short system, except of course for the English themselves who used to use the long system and tragically regressed to the short system officially in the 1970's. Of course, in my perfect world, we would use neither because we'd be using base-12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Why does the long system make vastly more sense? $1k, $1M, $1B, $1T, $1Q seem like pretty quick and easy abbreviations for all amounts of money that are commonly dealt with, at least for US or European currencies.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - googlryas 4y ago
    They both seem extremely arbitrary: Short scale: A short n-illion equals 10^(3n + 3) Long scale: A long n-illion equals 10^(6n) and a long n-illiard equals 10^(6n+3)
  - xeromal 4y ago
    How does it make vastly more sense? I think incrementing by a 1000 is vastly more simple than 1000 or million. It doubles the amount of names which may be useful scientifically but in a layman's world, we don't really use things past a billion.

This isn't a very serious comment, but it drives me bonkers how many monikers there are for a million. Now I have to prep my brain for the mln floating around. lol

Scoundreller 4y ago

Then in French they say “milliard” for billion. And billiard for trillion. Throws me off.

cjbgkagh 4y ago
I think the old style British Billion is a million million as well, so the meaning depends on how old the text is.
krisoft 4y ago
Wait until you learn that the French has a different word for many other concepts too! Crazy! Why can't they just use plain English nobody knows. \s
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > Wait until you learn that the French has a different word for many other concepts too! But it gets more interesting, they use the same words (or a very similar one) as in English to express different concepts. "Crier" sounds like cry, but it means "to scream".
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Even worse, there are "English sounding words" that mean things in French that don't exist and wouldn't make sense in English. E.g pressing is a dry cleaner, dressing is a wardrobe, footing is jogging.
  - baggy_trough 4y ago
    Like 'cry out'.
filoleg 4y ago
Oh god, so it wasn't just in russian. This made me go down this rabbithole to finally figure out what's up. I got curious about the details, and, turns out, it is related to whether the short scale or long scale system is used.[0] Short scale is the traditional million-billion-trillion-etc. Long scale is million-milliard-billion-billiard-etc. It isn't just naming for the same thing, as billion would actually have different power across those systems (power of 9 vs power of 12). Looks like both russia and france got their own variations of it. Russia uses short scale, but swapped the name for billion to milliard. While francophone, scandinavian, and a few other countries tend to use long scale. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
- Hanschri 4y ago
  As a Norwegian I can confirm it's confusing when reading numbers written in English. In Norway we use million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion, trilliard. But for a number such as '3 milliarder', one often writes '3.000 millioner' instead. Exactly why I don't know, but I would guess it has something to do with more accurately reflecting the size of the number. It might not be as clear that the number is 1000x the size with a simple change in the end of the word. The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion, after all. Speaking of confusion about numbers, just wait until you see how different countries divide up large numbers. Some countries, such as Norway write one million as 1.000.000,00 while others write it as 1,000,000.00.
- inawarminister 4y ago
  interestingly, Malaysia uses British/American style short scales (juta, biliun, triliun) while Indonesia uses short scale... but still retaining the old Dutch longscale just for billion (juta, milyar, triliun...) There might be other languages where this occur as well, not just Russian and Indonesian.
jaclaz 4y ago
In Italian it is milione/miliardo/bilione, when translating it is easy to make a mistake between the Italian bilione (10^12) and the English billion (10^9).
CountSessine 4y ago
This is the difference between the long number system and the short number system: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales The long system makes vastly more sense, but in the English world we use the short system, except of course for the English themselves who used to use the long system and tragically regressed to the short system officially in the 1970's. Of course, in my perfect world, we would use neither because we'd be using base-12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Why does the long system make vastly more sense? $1k, $1M, $1B, $1T, $1Q seem like pretty quick and easy abbreviations for all amounts of money that are commonly dealt with, at least for US or European currencies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- googlryas 4y ago
  They both seem extremely arbitrary: Short scale: A short n-illion equals 10^(3n + 3) Long scale: A long n-illion equals 10^(6n) and a long n-illiard equals 10^(6n+3)
- xeromal 4y ago
  How does it make vastly more sense? I think incrementing by a 1000 is vastly more simple than 1000 or million. It doubles the amount of names which may be useful scientifically but in a layman's world, we don't really use things past a billion.