billion

 

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From French billion, from bi- (“two”) +‎ -illion.

• enPR: bĭl'yən, IPA^(key): /ˈbɪljən/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: bil‧lion
• Rhymes: -ɪljən

billion (plural billions)

1. (US, modern British & Australian, short scale) a thousand million (logic: 1,000 × 1,000²): 1 followed by nine zeros, 10⁹; a milliard
   • 1921 January 24, “National Finances”, in Devon and Exeter Gazette, page 5:

     At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds (£7,000,000,000).

   • 2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist‎^[4], volume 407, number 8837, page 74:

     In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result.

   • 2019 October, Dan Harvey, “HS2 costs rise as schedule slips”, in Modern Railways, page 9:

     However, despite the prospect of HS2 being curtailed and the revelation that the programme is late and billions over budget, for now, at least, work on the scheme appears to be business as usual

   • 2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays” (18617), in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 1:

     The ChatGPT service which serves as Web front-end to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was the fastest-growing service in history to break the 100 million user milestone in January and had 1 billion visits by February 2023.

2. (dated, British & Australian, long scale) A million million (logic: 1,000,000²): a 1 followed by twelve zeros; 10¹²
   • 1778, Francis Maseres, “A Method of Finding, by the Help of Sir Isaac Newton's Binomial Theorem, a Near Value of the very Slowly Converging Infinite Series [...]”, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society‎^[5], volume lxviii, number xli:

     n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million

   • 2000 November 8, Stephen Ladyman, “[Speech to the House of Commons]”, in Hansard‎^[6]:

     There is a bill to be picked up for cleaning the former Soviet countries of £1 billion. By that I mean a British billion, because when I was little I was told that a billion was a million million and then the Americans said that it was a thousand million. Well, I am talking about a million million pounds worth of clean-up to be done.

3. (colloquial, hyperbolic) An unspecified very large number.

   There were billions of people at the concert.

• (10⁹): milliard, thousand million
• (10¹²): trillion (short scale)

• trillion, coined at same time
• zillion, coined after the series million, billion, trillion, quadrillion (modern slang)
• gazillion, from same origin
• -illion, from same origin

• (short scale) Previous: million. Next trillion.
• (long scale) Previous: milliard. Next billiard.
• ISO prefix: giga-

billion

1. 10¹²

From bi- (“two”) +‎ -illion; i.e., a million million.

Coined by Jehan Adam in 1475 as by-million.^{[1] [2] [3]} Rendered as byllion by Nicolas Chuquet in 1484, in his article “Triparty en la science des nombres”.^{[4] [5]}

• IPA^(key): /bi.ljɔ̃/

• Audio:

  (file)

billion m (plural billions)

1. trillion (10¹²)

   Synonym: mille milliards

2. (dated) billion (10⁹)

   Synonym: milliard

• trillion, coined at same time

• → Catalan: bilió
• → Portuguese: bilião, bilhão (informal in Portugal)

• “billion”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

billion m (plural billions)

1. billion, a million-million, 10¹²
   • 1520, Étienne de La Roche, L'arismethique novellement composee, page 6:

     ung billion vault mille milliers de millions

     a billion is equivalent to a thousand thousands of millions