4 ms·
I was looking at the bill from Weimar Germany that says "Zwei Billionen Mark" with the caption of "Two trillion mark" and I was like, did they get that wrong? I
by keeganjw 4y ago
I was looking at the bill from Weimar Germany that says "Zwei Billionen Mark" with the caption of "Two trillion mark" and I was like, did they get that wrong? I looked it up and sure enough the German word for trillion is billion! Languages are wild, I wonder how that happened.
- macintux 4y agoHere's some backstory on the UK vs US treatment of that question. https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-are-uk-and-american-billions-different https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-ar...
- keeganjw 4y agoOh cool, I didn't know the British used to do that as well!
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoIt's English that's weird here. In most languages that have the word “billion”, the long scale is used.
- djmips 4y agoAs mentioned elsewhere - American English.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoI would be very surprised if there's a currently spoken variety of English that doesn't use the short scale. British English switched many decades ago.
- actionablefiber 4y agoIn many many European languages the term for a thousand million is "milliard". English is the odd one out here. [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milliard#Descendants https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milliard#Descendants
- mr_toad 4y agoThe word billion used to mean million million in the UK until the 70’s. The American meaning has become more common in the last half century.