Trilliards in the UK

Factual Questions
1

There have been, on various occasions, threads about “how come the British billion is different from the American billion”.

(For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know the short answer: in the UK and several other countries using the same nomenclatural system, the groupings go upward as “ones/tens/hundreds, thousands, millions, milliards, billions”; in the US and other countries using that system instead, the sequence is “ones/tens/hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions”)

Today’s question: despite the popularity of scientific notation or the common practice of just using the smaller-number names in clusters (e.g., “one thousand million million grains of sand” instead of “one quadrillion grains of sand”), I still read and hear numbers names as trillions, quadrillions, and so on moderately often.

But the only time I ever hear mention of billiards and trilliards and whatnot is in the context of these discussions or on web sites that explain the nomenclature. Is that because I’m mostly exposed to media from the US and other countries using the same nomenclatural rules, or is it far less common in the UK (&etc) to actually speak these names for numbers? In other words, are y’all a whole lot more inclined to use only scientific notation or the “thousand million million” formulation?

I just did a quick websearch for trilliard or quadrilliard and all the hits on the first couple pages were “the names of the numbers” or “British versus American number-naming conventions” sites. Didn’t see any articles about “…Across the pond in America they may someday be looking at a trilliard-dollar deficit”. No articles about “scientists say the mass of the universe would have to be nearly 2 quadrilliard grams before that effect would be observable”.

OK, seems like part of the problem could be that a trilliard is a pretty big number (let’s see, in our system that would be sextillions and you don’t run into sextillions in everyday speech that often either). It would make sense to look at the lower end of the scale, then. I’ll bypass billiards for presumably obvious reasons, and check out milliards.

Hits for “milliard pounds”: 23
Hits for “billion dollars”: 1, 560,000

So: is the British nomenclatural system really in authentic everyday use, or is it just an anachronism that people like to throw into discussions whenever the subject of the names of numbers comes up?

2

We had a discussion on this recently (maybe a month ago), and the consensus from the British dopers was that billiards is an outdated term.

3

Actually, I meant to say “milliard” is outdated. I hadn’t even heard of “billiards” (outside of the game) and “trilliards” until your OP.

4

Here’s the thread

5

That link doesn’t seem to work. Here’s the thread.

The latter. ‘Milliard’ is not just outdated, it’s virtually unknown in Britain. I’ve certainly never seen or heard the word used, other than in discussions such as this. ‘Billion’ has for quite some time meant the same as it does in the US. For example, from the linked thread, the Treasury officially adopted the American definition in 1974.

6

A search for “milliard” on Google reveals plenty of usage in French, Norwegian and Danish, but the usual definitions or US-English comparisons of usage in English-language sites; nothing like “The three milliard pound budget …”. I had a lot of searching to do before I found [url=“http://www.payvand.com/news/01/jan/1153.html”]this reference[/url to “700 milliard toumans” in Iran.

Indians still use crore quite a bit; it indicates ten million.

7

So, in conclusion, there remains no more legitimate barriers to favoring the use of the (US-system) names over clumsy constructs like “thousand million million”?

Good!