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Comment by jbj | Hacker News Reader

reporting news from english sources in continental Europe, it happens that billion is incorrectly translated to billion instead of milliard, causing a factor 1000 to appear out of nowhere. (do your own math for trillions)

The one in the example may be a brain fart, but so many other errors could be prevented by standardizing a few things ... decimals and thousand sepatators is another one

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Does Anybody actually use milliard? Here in the UK million is a thousand thousand, billion a thousand million etc. I always assumed that was the same for our mainland cousins.

We Germans do. It gets very confusing when I switch languages.

In Dutch too. Many mistakes are made when translating English sources.

The UK used to use milliard, and officially switched to billion for 10⁹ in 1974.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale (there's a map of current usage, most of Europe uses milliard etc.)

I think this might be the difference between long and short scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale

Not in English, but most European languages use essentially the same words to describe numbers like 1 million and higher, except that some use the million/miliard convention and some the million/billion convention.

For example, in French, 1 million dollars is "1 milion de dolars", but 1 billion dollars is "1 miliard de dolars". Then, 1 trilion dollars is "1 billion de dollars", and a quadrillion dollars is "1 billiard de dollars".

Not a European language but milliard is used for billion in Hebrew

In Hungary we use it all the time keeping track who stole how much.

I grew up in the UK. When I was a kid, 'billion' was ambiguous: it might mean 10^12 or 10^9. If the source was American you could be sure they meant 10^9.

As a crusader for the best solution, I think these are both wrong (as it should never have been this way). 10^6 should be billion, 10^9 should be trillion, etc. Then the prefix would match the number of 1000x multiplications.

But with the long scale the prefix matches the number if 10^6 multiplications (with an extra factor 1000 for -ard).

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