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Comment by flysand7 | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda wondering are there any countries that still use the long scale nowadays? For me the biggest thing I've had to learn is that in Russian we use a short scale, except we don't have "billion" and instead it's "milliard". So it's just that you need to be careful with translating that one word. Are there other countries where the scale "shifts"?

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Germany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers.

Chinese:

  1 yi
  10 shi
  100 bai
  1000 qian
  10000 wan
  10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand)
  100 x 10000 bai wan (one million)
  1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million)
  1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million)
  10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)

Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...

China seems to have even more scales..

  myriad scale - based on 10.000
  mid-scale    - based on 10⁸
  long scale   - based on doubling of exponent (4, 8, 16, 32, ..)

The Indian system is coincidentally being discussed right now at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492175 .

> Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...

They write thousands just like in the U.S. system, with the same commas: 20,000. But beyond that, the "lakh" is 100k, the "crore" is 10M, and commas in written figures go in twos:

The population of Australia is about 2.8 crores: 2,80,00,000. The Delhi metro area is over 3.4 crores: 3,40,00,000.

They have more unique words for every 100-multiple unit after crore, to go along with the commas, but in everyday practice they don't use those terms. Instead, they go "long" on the crores. Thus, India's population is about 146 crores; the new Mumbai underground Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ line will cost ₹21,000 crore.

When reporting foreign money, they use the U.S. system with millions and billions as usual: ₹21,000 crore is parenthesized (US$2.5 billion).

Pretty much all of continental Europe is on long scale. In computing it's masked by SI prefixes. Nobody talks about billion bytes whatever it means.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...

Would be cool to use "ten giga-euros" to express "10 billion €". A bit like giga-gram in ... astronomy?

I'd prefer if US tech went with giga parameters instead of billion.

Spain.

But more and more people use "billions" (not billardo, which is our own term for it). The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).

>The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).

I sometimes say (in Portuguese) "dez kapa".

It's just slang. Language changes a lot faster than you realise, and a lot of words that are "normal" to you would illicit the same response before you were born.

Czech does as well, milion, miliarda, bilion, biliarda...

In Italian, "billion" is still normally called "miliardo".

edit: can't spell

Small typo, but it's "Miliardo" (one "l").

Portugal uses it, but probably due to foreign influence there’s more and more people that use the short scale, which makes everything a mess

Yep it's a mess. Most newspapers and official channels just avoid the word billion altogether, just writing "mil milhões" (a thousand million).

AFAIK the exception is the finance world, where I believe B stands for the short scale for a long time, and $1B has been used in newspapers for a long time too due to globalisation of the economy.

Isn’t “mil milhões” the proper term in the long scale? “Bilião” would be equivalent to the short-scale trillion, e.g., “NVidia vale $4 biliões”, which is equivalent to “NVidia is worth $4 trillion”.

I’m

Sweden still does (and I believe the other Scandinavians as well).

Same in Turkey. We say Milliard instead of Billion. In my childhood I can swear it was like Million->Milliard->Trillion->Trilliard. They were in daily language because 1 Million Turkish Lira was like a few dollars. At some point they decided Trilliard does not exist and it became something like a Mandela Effect for me. We never used Billion though.

I still don't know which is which. Just give me the power to the 10, Is it 10^9 or 10^12? Who know?

So you skip billion? What comes after, Quadrillion or Quintillion? (Sure they are not common, but in theory.)

German does.

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