6 ms·
Million Times Million
- lgl 1y agoNumberphile did a video on this many years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ
- flysand7 1y agoI'm kinda wondering are there any countries that still use the long scale nowadays? For me the biggest thing I've had to learn is that in Russian we use a short scale, except we don't have "billion" and instead it's "milliard". So it's just that you need to be careful with translating that one word. Are there other countries where the scale "shifts"?
- gpderetta 1y agoIn Italian, "billion" is still normally called "miliardo". edit: can't spell
- Wilder7977 1y agoSmall typo, but it's "Miliardo" (one "l").
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ginko 1y agoGerman does.
- belchiorb 1y agoPortugal uses it, but probably due to foreign influence there’s more and more people that use the short scale, which makes everything a mess
- tiagod 1y agoYep it's a mess. Most newspapers and official channels just avoid the word billion altogether, just writing "mil milhões" (a thousand million). AFAIK the exception is the finance world, where I believe B stands for the short scale for a long time, and $1B has been used in newspapers for a long time too due to globalisation of the economy.
- belchiorb 1y agoIsn’t “mil milhões” the proper term in the long scale? “Bilião” would be equivalent to the short-scale trillion, e.g., “NVidia vale $4 biliões”, which is equivalent to “NVidia is worth $4 trillion”. I’m
- solstice 1y agoGermany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers. Chinese: 1 yi 10 shi 100 bai 1000 qian 10000 wan 10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand) 100 x 10000 bai wan (one million) 1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million) 1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million) 10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion) Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...
- adornKey 1y agoChina seems to have even more scales.. myriad scale - based on 10.000 mid-scale - based on 10⁸ long scale - based on doubling of exponent (4, 8, 16, 32, ..)
- JdeBP 1y agoThe Indian system is coincidentally being discussed right now at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492175 .
- ripe 1y ago> Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh... They write thousands just like in the U.S. system, with the same commas: 20,000. But beyond that, the "lakh" is 100k, the "crore" is 10M, and commas in written figures go in twos: The population of Australia is about 2.8 crores: 2,80,00,000. The Delhi metro area is over 3.4 crores: 3,40,00,000. They have more unique words for every 100-multiple unit after crore, to go along with the commas, but in everyday practice they don't use those terms. Instead, they go "long" on the crores. Thus, India's population is about 146 crores; the new Mumbai underground Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ line will cost ₹21,000 crore. When reporting foreign money, they use the U.S. system with millions and billions as usual: ₹21,000 crore is parenthesized (US$2.5 billion).
- kaliszad 1y agoCzech does as well, milion, miliarda, bilion, biliarda...
- scotty79 1y agoPretty much all of continental Europe is on long scale. In computing it's masked by SI prefixes. Nobody talks about billion bytes whatever it means. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg/975px-EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...
- ozgung 1y agoSame in Turkey. We say Milliard instead of Billion. In my childhood I can swear it was like Million->Milliard->Trillion->Trilliard. They were in daily language because 1 Million Turkish Lira was like a few dollars. At some point they decided Trilliard does not exist and it became something like a Mandela Effect for me. We never used Billion though.
- fsniper 1y agoI still don't know which is which. Just give me the power to the 10, Is it 10^9 or 10^12? Who know?
- 1718627440 1y agoSo you skip billion? What comes after, Quadrillion or Quintillion? (Sure they are not common, but in theory.)
- piva00 1y agoSweden still does (and I believe the other Scandinavians as well).
- luismedel 1y agoSpain. But more and more people use "billions" (not billardo, which is our own term for it). The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).
- tiagod 1y ago>The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no). I sometimes say (in Portuguese) "dez kapa". It's just slang. Language changes a lot faster than you realise, and a lot of words that are "normal" to you would illicit the same response before you were born.
- HocusLocus 1y agoAs a kid I stressed our Olivetti divisumma 24 ( https://www.ithistory.org/sites/default/files/hardware/Olivetti%20Divisumma%2024.jpg https://www.ithistory.org/sites/default/files/hardware/Olive... ) with a million times a million. It entered a perpetual mechanical cycle that even unplugging it could not break. Finally Dad had to attack its innards and tug and twiddle until he pulled out a spring loaded gear and it caught a cog on the next go-round. It lifted its digit arms and printed out a 'partial answer' that was a series of random numbers as wide as the whole mechanism. He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
- witrak 1y agoIt is used in all European countries (I don't know any European country that doesn't use it). I know the long scale under the name "European" and the short scale as "American".
- swores 1y agoUK used to do it the European way, but has adopted American way since (IIRC) about 50 years ago. As a Brit I wish we still used the traditional way. (And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)
- randomtoast 1y agoIt may take fifty years, but I think that you will eventually rejoin the EU.
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago>I don't know any European country that doesn't use it With the exception of people over 70, the UK has pretty uniformly moved to the American system. All of our govt statistics, corporate finances info, day-to-day conversations involving billions refer to "one thousand million"
- mynti 1y agothis is so funny because i always envied english for it being so clear: million, billion, trillion. in german we have these "awkward" names in between: million, milliarden, billionen, billiarden. but now hearing about this long scale it actually does make quite a lot more sense when thinking about it in multiples of millions
- krawcu 1y agosame in polish milion, miliard, bilion, biliard, trylion, tryliard, kwadrylion, kwadryliard...
- mc32 1y agoI think they forgot "thousandard" = 1,000,000. And million is a thousandard of those.
- 3036e4 1y agoSwedish does that as well. miljon, miljard, biljon, biljard. This is sufficiently confusing to people that every time I see a newspaper article mention something is a biljon of something they have to mention how much it is and remind readers to not confuse it with an American billion (that is only a miljard). In most contexts when big numbers like those show up though the metric-system comes to the rescue, since things will be referred to as being a mega-something or giga-something etc anyway. That works great until Americans attempt to do it and get the letters wrong or use K instead of k or M instead of m that causes new confusion and then we're back at having to guess what something means depending on what side of the Atlantic it was written.
- dariosalvi78 1y agosame in Italian: milione (1E6), miliardo (1E9), bilione (1E12) etc.. the long scale a "one" is 1E6 bigger than the previous one, example: bilione is 1E6 bigger than milione.
- chaz6 1y agoI am British and the old scale (million, milliard, etc) makes more sense to me as it allows you to describe much larger numbers with fewer words.
- javier_e06 1y agoI Spanish language we have this dad joke: ¿Que es un millón? Mil miles. ¿Que es un billón? Un millón de millones. ¿Que es un semillón? ??? Una semilla muy grande.
- joarv0249nw 1y ago"Mr. President, two Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq." "Oh my god... How many is a Brazilian?"
- vincnetas 1y agoTIL about one more thing US misunderstood and now we have to deal with it. Another one is command key on mac, "borrowed" from road sign indicating "sight seeing place" :)
- gjvc 1y agohttps://brndstudio.medium.com/how-a-swedish-road-sign-inspired-the-macbook-command-key-d9405491d7ba https://brndstudio.medium.com/how-a-swedish-road-sign-inspir...
- eviks 1y agoWhat was misunderstood in the command key? The link mentions nothing of the sorts
- MonstraG 1y agoDon't know anything about misunderstandings, but the symbol in question is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looped_square https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looped_square
- justusthane 1y agoI don't see how borrowing the Swedish "point of interest" symbol for the command key is "misunderstanding" something - as I understand the story, they just liked the symbol and decided to use it. Also, I'm certainly not a US apologist, but I also don't see how the US using the short scale is a case of misunderstanding - it sounds like they just decided that it makes more sense that way (and I would agree, although maybe that's just because I'm used to it).
- wltr 1y agoIt makes no sense I’d say. In many European languages it’s milliard, etc.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y agoWhy is million special when the numbers are grouped in 3s (thousands)? That makes no sense. Why flip flop suffixes between ion and iard?
- nkurz 1y agoThe 80's song "One Billion is Big" by the "Fat Boys" seems very relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdnLhN4SeYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdnLhN4SeYY
- AStonesThrow 1y ago[dead]
- nkurz 1y agoI know we're not supposed to complain about being voted down, but this is a case where the downvoters are simply wrong and need to be corrected. This is a fantastic educational song designed to teach children how big a billion is by using examples involving hamburgers. I promise it will be the best 80's educational rap you hear all day.
- danbruc 1y agoAccording to Wikipedia the two variants exist because the digits of large numbers used to be grouped into groups of six digits but in order to improve readability this was eventually changed to groups of three digits and some insisted that with that also the naming should be adjusted. A long scale trillion has three digit groups when using groups of six digits (1,000000,000000,000000) and six after the switch to groups of three (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) which then should be a short scale sextillion but somehow it ended up as a quintillion.
- alberth 1y agoSo basically 2 commas = "Millions" 3 commas = "Billions" 4 commas = ...
- zeckalpha 1y agoN-illion = 1000^(n-1)
- GolDDranks 1y agoAnd in East Asia, we use a system based on exponents of 10000. I kind of like it, except when I have to think about it and the short/long scales at the same time. 10000^1 = 万 10000^2 = 億 10000^3 = 兆 10000^4 = 京
- quartesixte 1y agoAh the Myriad system. Curious how the sinosphere adopted this alongside the Greeks. These do converge I think at 10^12 = Short Trillion/Long Billion Which makes for some non-frictionless translating since 10^6 and 10^9 are all in-between words, and 10^12 is not a commonly used number to count anything in everyday life.
- pilaf 1y agoSpanish uses the long scale, but lately I've been noticing people mistakenly using the short scale in Spanish more and more, likely due to the influence of English and the internet, sometimes even in news articles and other "professional" publications. You may see someone speaking of "un trillón de dólares" (a trillion dollars), which while it makes sense in English when speaking of federal budgets or the market cap of FAANG, in long scale that's more than the world's entire money supply. It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.
- mattigames 1y agoIt's only "mistakenly" until it becomes the norm, which as another Spanish speaking person, I bet that will be the case no long in the future.
- pilaf 1y agoYeah, I too think that's likely the direction we're heading, and I'd be fine with either option as long as it was consistently used, this transitional phase is just painful.
- mattigames 1y agoIn the meanwhile you can say one thousand millions (for what Americans call a billion), like the local tv news does, and for the bigger one say just say millions of millions (what Americans call a trillion), that should be unambiguous enough.
- Aardwolf 1y agoIn Dutch the word "miljard" for 10^9 is too well known and deeply ingrained to change I think, but with "triljoen" which could either mean 10^18 or a direct conversion from the American English trillion, all bets are off
- kruxigt 1y ago[dead]
- marginalia_nu 1y agoI just seamlessly switch scales and units with the language. When I talk Swedish I think in terms of long scale, 24 h clock, SI units. When I talk English I think in terms of short scale, 12 h clock, imperial units. It's like different cultural basis vectors.
- mattigames 1y agoIn the long system how is a billionaire called? A milliardaire? That doesn't sound right.
- seszett 1y agoMilliardaire yes, of course. Why doesn't that sound right to you? https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_milliardaires_du_monde https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_milliardaires_du_mon...
- mattigames 1y agoIt doesn't sound like English, at least in my brain it doesn't register as English, and I may have found a plausible reason: If you look up the amount of English words with the letters "iarda" on them you only find 3 words (at least according to wordmine.info), but French shows 38 words, even just "arda" the difference is huge: 317 vs 2017 words https://www.wordmine.info/french/words-with?minletters=2&maxletters=45&query=arda https://www.wordmine.info/french/words-with?minletters=2&max...
- seszett 1y agoWell, it's mostly the -aire ending that is uncommon in English, because it comes from French, as far as I know all -aire words in English are straight French loanwords. It's somewhat equivalent to the English suffix -ar. That makes millionaire and billionaire about as unenglish as milliardaire, I think it just doesn't sound weird to you because you see them more often.
- moralestapia 1y ago>It doesn't sound like English [...] Guess what? Some people (70-80% of the world) speak other languages.
- krab 1y agoIn Czech, which uses the long scale, yes. The equivalent of "milliardaire".
- 1y ago
- intpx 1y agoOh thanks for completely breaking my numeracy. Gotta relearn maths real quick
- 867-5309 1y ago>imagine my disappointment when I left home for university, got access to computers and the World Wide Web, and discovered that the names I had learnt were off by several orders of magnitude imagine discovering mega- giga- tera- then not mentioning them
- eviks 1y agoLong scale seems to be much better because you have to remember fewer prefixes, so with fewer easier to remember rules you get wider coverage Why didn't this principle win?
- WindyMiller 1y agoOn the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable. (Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
- toast0 1y agoWell who wants to be a milliardaire? Or even worse, a billiardaire, sounds like you just play pool.
- aaron695 1y agoThe Economist (British) changed from million million -> thousand million in (1944) - "If it is objected that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation" The US leading the way in a sensible measuring system.
- tiagod 1y agoThis was flagged. I vouched for it as it has an interesting insight, even if you find the joke unnecessary. I did however not find the quote via Google search. Can you share the source? EDIT: I have found the source! https://archive.org/details/sim_economist_1943-11-06_145_5228/page/611/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/sim_economist_1943-11-06_145_522... The Economist, November 6, 1943: >The “Billion” >This week, for the first time, the note circulation is in excess of £1,000 million. There is, of course, very little real difference between £999 million and £1,001 million—apart from a difficulty for the compositor who works within a narrow column. And yet there is a great psychological barrier, and the setting-down of that extra digit, with its comma following, seems to symbolise the breaking of fresh ground. The totals of revenue and expenditure have, of course, been in ten figures almost ever since the beginning of the war, and the total of the national debt—a rather shadowy notion anyhow—is well into eleven. With the line crossed by a third familiar statistic it is natural to ask what this magnitude of 1,000 million is to be called. There is no word native to these islands. The continental word “milliard” was in some use some years ago, but has not been used very much recently. Well over half the English-speaking peoples, however, use “billion” to mean a thousand million, and if it is objected to this usage that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation. For some time past, The Economist has been using “billion” in American contexts with the American meaning—i.e:, one thousand million. It now seems convenient to extend that usage to British and foreign contexts. Henceforward, in these columns, in the absence of specific indication to the contrary, “billion” means 1 and nine 0’s.
- aaron695 1y ago
- frizlab 1y agoOh I never got why there was a confusion for the value of billion and co. I always assumed I did not get the proper value, but now it makes much more sense!
- globular-toast 1y agoA theory that's been brewing in my mind is the success of the US can largely be attributed to having a single common language. Even in England itself people use different words to describe the same thing, causing confusion. In many other countries they speak completely different languages! In the US it's all the same. As an Englishman it's remarkable to me that people in Boston and people in California are really not that different at all. Some may say it's boring, but it can't be denied how easy it makes business etc. So many of the problems I have at work are due to language. It's doubly difficult when you're talking with people with a different native tongue. Some things just don't translate and even if they do it adds overhead. So, ultimately, it doesn't matter what Americans say or how much they've "misunderstood" English etc, what matters is that every single one of them understands the same billion, the same units of measurement, the same idioms etc.
- user____name 1y agoA number-to-words in both long and short scale in various languages would be a neat selling point for a calculator program.
- OkPin 1y agoThe bit about the name “billion” still literally meaning “million million” in long scale really shows how old language shapes modern confusion. What’s interesting is that the long scale actually matches the literal Latin root more closely, so in a way, the “modern” short scale is less intuitive linguistically, but more practical numerically.
- perilunar 1y agoAny of those numbers higher than a trillion are a bit useless really — when dealing with large numbers I'm using scientific or engineering notation, or using SI prefixes.
- dotnetcarpenter 1y agoI'm from Denmark were we use the long scale. I didn't know a long scale form existed in English! It happens quite often that a billion, in English, gets translated to a billion in Danish, which is off by 999 billion and, of course, should have been a milliard. ;-) If it happens in Spanish, it probably happens in most of Europe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44509534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44509534
- Jotalea 1y agoThe same thing happened to me, except I was younger and could adapt more easily. I'm bilingual, I watch and read content in both Spanish (my native language) and English. Back in 2021, I heard that Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" had hit 1 billion views on YouTube. I loved that song back then. I was really amazed, so I decided to check it out for myself. But to my surprise, the video said “1000 millones de vistas” (millón = million). Confused, I asked myself, “Why do they say the video hit one billion views if it only says one thousand million here?” That’s when I figured out that billón doesn’t mean the same as billion. And now, years later, I’m reading your blog post about your experience, and commenting on it in a language that’s not even my native one.
- lwansbrough 1y agoIs the billiard (10^15) the name sake of the 15-ball game by the same name?
- c22 1y agoI don't think so: https://www.etymonline.com/word/billiards https://www.etymonline.com/word/billiards
- bitwize 1y agoWell, Trump and Musk can just get up in front of the UN and say, "to most of the world we're mere milliardaires, not billionaires!"