# Trillions! Too... Many... Zeros...

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trillions-too-many-zeros/467853>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [October 14, 2008, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trillions-too-many-zeros/467853 "2008-10-14T11:56:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Wiltshire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ea5d25/32.png) [@Wiltshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wiltshire)\
**Post date:** [October 14, 2008, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trillions-too-many-zeros/467853/1 "2008-10-14T11:56:59Z")

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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27137551/](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27137551/) - Europe puts $2.3 trillion on line for banks

Enough already. Aw, just when I got used to visualising “hundreds of _billions_”, they switch words. From now on, can’t we simply use scientific notation, please?

$2.3·10[sup]12[/sup]. There. Bush’s $7·10[sup]11[/sup] beginning to look anemic by comparison. Heh. We’ll own you, you and your American banks. We’ll buy you out. _Own_ you! Mwhuawhahaha! All your banks are belong to us.

See? Normalised exponential notation is so much easier to understand and to compare. And no language confusion between trillions, milliards, billions, quadrillions, either. And there’s another advantage when you’re borrowing from the mathematical sciences. You can always upgrade your number system:

There’s “_imaginary numbers_”, too! Oh, wait, obviously the financial system already knew about those…

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**Author:** ![Walker\_in\_Eternity](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/46a35a/32.png) [@Walker\_in\_Eternity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walker_in_Eternity)\
**Post date:** [October 14, 2008, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trillions-too-many-zeros/467853/2 "2008-10-14T12:53:28Z")

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Don’t forget billiards as well.

I agree with you in principle however I think that in conversation, names for numbers work best. I don’t know how the person in the street would react to hagving lots of numbers quoted at them.

As a Brit I’m aware of the differences in naming conventions for large numbers, but these have largely disappeared in recent years as we have gone to the more American naming convention for numbers.

Except for one former colleague of mine who insists that a modern billion (10^9) is a milliard everyone I know uses the term billion.

Wikipedia have a nice page to help: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names\_of\_large\_numbers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers)