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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

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.

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.