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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's my interpretation of a billion too. I vaguely recall that India or Britain interprets a billion differently though. Maybe that's what they're thinking?

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I think it's the same in UK English as well. But in some (most?) European languages billion actually means 1 000 000 million (so a thousand times more). And we use "milliard" for 1000 million.

It looks like you're right. Just looked it up. A billion is 1million^2 in its etymology so English speakers are the odd one out.

He hasn't reached the goal yet, and is currently doing 100 million in ~34 seconds.

> Looking forward to discussions and/or collaborations with curious souls in my quest to generate a billion record SQLite DB quickly. If this sounds interesting to you, reach out to me on Twitter or submit a PR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale for anyone that's interested in the differences

In Swedish, and I think in German and other languages too, 1 billion is 1e12. 1e9 is called milliard / miljard in Swedish.

Yes, in Germany too.

And in the Netherlands.

Also in Bulgaria

Just about everyone in the UK defines a billion to be 10^9. I've heard about the 10^12 definition but never encountered anyone who uses it - I think it must have been an older usage that fell out of favour.

In 1974, the UK government abandoned the long scale (million, milliard, billion, billiard) in favor of the short scale (million, billion, trillion, quadrillion) used in the US. The long scale is still used in languages like Dutch, German, and French.

And in 2001, The 51st State was released...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_51st_State

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