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For the last several decades, every English speaking country has used the short billion (1e9).

• jamiek88 3y ago
  Yep, even the BBC surrendered to the Americanism.
  • seabass-labrax 3y ago
    According to Wikipedia's summary of the situation, the French are to blame for the ambiguity - no surprises there! ;) But if we're going to avoid Americanisms, the better way is simply to use the word 'milliard', which makes perfect, unambiguous sense in any language.
    • lupire 3y ago
      Except that it's a terrible word because milli means thousand, and ard just means a grammatical modification. So all that accomplishes is conflating thousand with million with billion. (Of course "million" is already a conflation of "thousand"!)
      • seabass-labrax 3y ago
        Oh, good point... Right, back to the drawing board - how about "kilocount" for a thousand, "megacount" for a million, and "gigacounts" for a (short) billion? The prefixes were apparently resurrected from the Greek for use in the metric system, but haven't had any other contradictory meanings as far as I can tell. I know I'm mixing up the Greek and Latin roots with "-count", but "kiloarithmos" is two syllables too many!