| gen. |
a thousand million, a milliard (US, modern British & Australian, short scale: 109 • At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds (£7,000,000,000).  wiktionary.org • In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year.) |
| obs., brit. |
a million million, a trillion (dated, rare, British & Australian, long scale: 1012 • n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million (1778) wiktionary.org • 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. (2000 Ladyman, Stephen, Speech to the House of Commons) |
