this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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you are using the word billion incorrectly, a billion is a million million, and it was 20 thousand millons, not 40.
It's slightly more complicated than that and in the case of most natively English-speaking countries you'd be wrong, so I'd argue that in terms of the English language you're wrong
So in most of western Europe and most of South America, you'd be right as they use the long scale, but none of those are natively English-speaking nations. UK and Ireland use the short scale, as does the US, NZ, AU. Canada uses both, I'd assume the French speaking part uses long scale. Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, the Gulf states, and NW Asia actually use short scale with milliard instead of billion, and as you go towards south or east in Asia, you'll run into completely different number systems, such as the funky Indian one that goes by hundreds rather than thousands as groups starting with 1,00,000 (1 lakh) and 1,00,00,000 (1 crore).
TL;DR: There's no unified worldwide standard, but for pretty much all English language usage, you'd be wrong.
They are speaking English so a billion is a thousand million. There is no English speaking country anymore that uses long scale. So no English speaking country uses miljard for a thousand million.
So for context, in English billion is thousand millions, but in Spanish is a million millions (so, an English trillion)
They gave using the English definition.
Actually, it was a million million in english as well. It's a thousand million in simplified (american) english, and for some reason, we just ended up kowtowing to their bullshit.
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-61424,00.html
It was a weird false friend, but now it's even weirder they (US) just changed the definition of a number.
The us system of counting was generally considered easier and more reasonable and it had less quirks. The logic behind adopting it is literally the same one people use to argue the metric system is better. And it also was a fuck you to the British that no body liked at the time.
No
Math is hard -xta