Always wondered since we hear it so much lately, how much is a BILLION dollars?
I know $100,000 is 1/10 of a million and you almost get to a million just after you pass 999,999 then the next dollar would be a million.
But I have heard some people say 1000 million is a billion.
I thought a billion 's was $999,999,999 million then the next dollar would be 1 billion.
So does that mean that $1 Billion is 100,000 million.
And is $1000 million dollars 1/1000th of a $Billion?
I’m confused?
The civilized world calls 1,000 Million a Billion.
The Brits call one Million Million a Billion.
For everyday use, the first definition is the one that you use.
Billion is 1,000,000,000 or 1 thousand million on the short scale which is what people typically use. In the long scale (I always considered that an older British definition) it’s 1,000,000 millions or 1,000,000,000,000
As for how big a billion dollars is consider that it costs about ~$100k for someone to pay an employee for 1 year - that includes real estate, benefits, salary etc. That mans $1 Billion is 10,000 employees for 1 year.
The British have been moving towards a billion meaning a thousand million for a while now, because of the US influence, and because it’s easier to say “a billion” than “a thousand million”.
What brought this up the other day was someone said on a TV newscast that we have something like 326 million people riding our TRANSIT SYSTEM (TTC) every year. I was thinking that sounds like it should be in the billions?
So what are the real numbers should it be a million million to be a billion?
And why does the US say it’s only 1000 million?
Aren’t numbers, numbers?
I guess I’m already a billionaire then…
Excellent article here: Long and short scales - Wikipedia
Let’s take this apart.
Correct. Each subtracted zero brings you down to 1/10 the previous. 100,000 is 1/10 of a million, 10,000 is 1/10 of 100,000; 1,000 is 1/10 of 10,000.
999,999 would be read 999 thousand and 999. The next number would indeed be 1,000,000 or 1 million. Then 1 million and 1, 1 million and 2, etc.
This is correct. 1000 thousand is a million. 1000 million is a billion. 1000 billion is a trillion. This is the usage in place almost everywhere.
Yes, just as the next number after 999 thousand and 999 is 1 million, then the next number after 999 million, 999 thousand and 999 is 1 billion.
And this is where you go off the rails. Where do you get that extra 100 from?
No, you’re doubling things unnecessarily. 1000 million is a billion. But 1 million is 1/1000 of a billion. If a billion is 1000 million this must be true.
Apparently it depends on the numbering scale you’re using.
The long scale (in which 1 billion = 10^12) is slowly falling out of favor; everyone I know in the hard sciences will tell you that 1 billion equals 10^9.
Missed the edit window.
ETA: numbers are always numbers. Our names for numbers can be anything we want. 10000 can be called a myriad. The British used to call 1,000,000,000 a milliard. The abbreviation for 1000 can be k, for kilo, or m, from the Latin numeral for 1000. Number names are just convenient short ways of saying long strings of numbers. But 326,000,000 is always less than a billion, or a milliard, or anything else you want to call 1,000,000,000. It’s one whole order of magnitude smaller, an order of magnitude being each extra power of ten represented by another numeral.
The population of Toronto is 2.5 Million.
If 326 Million people ride Toronto’s public transportation each year, that’s 130 rides per person per year, which sounds like a lot to me.
However, if 326 BILLION people rode the system each year, that would be 130,000 rides per person per year, which is clearly absurd.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation is all that’s needed to see which number makes more sense.
We miss you, Carl Sagan.
Yes.
That was easy!
Here is how I think of it. About 20 years ago, there were a series of architectural lectures sponsored by AlCan. A very distinguished architect was about to begin. There were maybe 400 people present. Then Phyllis Lambert, widely reputed to be worth a billion, walked in and I quickly determined that the average per capita net worth of the audience had just risen by $2.5 million! That’s serious money. When she wanted there to be an architectural museum in Montreal, she took $20 million out of her petty cash drawer and built it!
I never thought I would hear serious use of a trillion dollars, but I did last night. To put that in some perspective, it would take a million millionaires to get up to a billion.
You mean trillion.
I made a similar mistake in my post that I fortunately found before posting. These word number threads drive you crazy.
I guess this is not a good time to bring up septuagintillion?
Eh, A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
I think of these numbers in relation to the US population, at least when it comes to money. There’s around a third of a billion people here. A billion dollars means $3 for every man, woman and child in the US. A trillion dollars is $3,000 for every person. A $10 trillion debt is $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the nation.
To give you an idea how how much $10 trillion national debt is, if there were one guy in the United States, he would owe $10 trillion.
Verrry useful…
And then he’d try to borrow some more off of you.