According to Wikipedia the two variants exist because the digits of large numbers used to be grouped into groups of six digits but in order to improve readability this was eventually changed to groups of three digits and some insisted that with that also the naming should be adjusted. A long scale trillion has three digit groups when using groups of six digits (1,000000,000000,000000) and six after the switch to groups of three (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) which then should be a short scale sextillion but somehow it ended up as a quintillion.
cmcconomy · 1h ago
Thanks!
This is the key piece of information for making sense of it. Ultimately the OP's insight is that the number-naming system used in the west is thousands based instead of millions based, but came to that by observing the number-naming outcomes instead of the source notation that led to it.
The original long scale makes more sense, billion, bi million, twice six digits.
zeckalpha · 1h ago
Yet, mille and milli- mean thousand.
danbruc · 1h ago
But the suffix -one in Italian is used to indicate something big - spaghetti vs spaghettoni - so a milione is a big thousand, a million.
vincnetas · 2h ago
TIL about one more thing US misunderstood and now we have to deal with it. Another one is command key on mac, "borrowed" from road sign indicating "sight seeing place" :)
eviks · 1h ago
What was misunderstood in the command key? The link mentions nothing of the sorts
this is so funny because i always envied english for it being so clear: million, billion, trillion. in german we have these "awkward" names in between: million, milliarden, billionen, billiarden. but now hearing about this long scale it actually does make quite a lot more sense when thinking about it in multiples of millions
krawcu · 2h ago
same in polish
milion, miliard, bilion, biliard, trylion, tryliard, kwadrylion, kwadryliard...
mc32 · 2h ago
I think they forgot "thousandard" = 1,000,000. And million is a thousandard of those.
pilaf · 1h ago
Spanish uses the long scale, but lately I've been noticing people mistakenly using the short scale in Spanish more and more, likely due to the influence of English and the internet, sometimes even in news articles and other "professional" publications. You may see someone speaking of "un trillón de dólares" (a trillion dollars), which while it makes sense in English when speaking of federal budgets or the market cap of FAANG, in long scale that's more than the world's entire money supply.
It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.
mattigames · 1h ago
It's only "mistakenly" until it becomes the norm, which as another Spanish speaking person, I bet that will be the case no long in the future.
Aardwolf · 1h ago
In Dutch the word "miljard" for 10^9 is too well known and deeply ingrained to change I think, but with "triljoen" which could either mean 10^18 or a direct conversion from the American English trillion, all bets are off
pilaf · 1h ago
Yeah, I too think that's likely the direction we're heading, and I'd be fine with either option as long as it was consistently used, this transitional phase is just painful.
mattigames · 1h ago
In the meanwhile you can say one thousand millions (for what Americans call a billion), like the local tv news does, and for the bigger one say just say millions of millions (what Americans call a trillion), that should be unambiguous enough.
GolDDranks · 2h ago
And in East Asia, we use a system based on exponents of 10000. I kind of like it, except when I have to think about it and the short/long scales at the same time.
10000^1 = 万
10000^2 = 億
10000^3 = 兆
10000^4 = 京
marginalia_nu · 1h ago
I just seamlessly switch scales and units with the language.
When I talk Swedish I think in terms of long scale, 24 h clock, SI units.
When I talk English I think in terms of short scale, 12 h clock, imperial units.
It's like different cultural basis vectors.
HocusLocus · 2d ago
As a kid I stressed our Olivetti divisumma 24 ( https://www.ithistory.org/sites/default/files/hardware/Olive... ) with a million times a million. It entered a perpetual mechanical cycle that even unplugging it could not break. Finally Dad had to attack its innards and tug and twiddle until he pulled out a spring loaded gear and it caught a cog on the next go-round. It lifted its digit arms and printed out a 'partial answer' that was a series of random numbers as wide as the whole mechanism.
He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
Long scale seems to be much better because you have to remember fewer prefixes, so with fewer easier to remember rules you get wider coverage
Why didn't this principle win?
WindyMiller · 59m ago
On the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable.
(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
javier_e06 · 2h ago
I Spanish language we have this dad joke:
¿Que es un millón? Mil miles.
¿Que es un billón? Un millón de millones.
¿Que es un semillón? ???
Una semilla muy grande.
joarv0249nw · 2h ago
"Mr. President, two Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq."
"Oh my god... How many is a Brazilian?"
intpx · 1h ago
Oh thanks for completely breaking my numeracy. Gotta relearn maths real quick
witrak · 2h ago
It is used in all European countries (I don't know any European country that doesn't use it). I know the long scale under the name "European" and the short scale as "American".
OtherShrezzing · 2h ago
>I don't know any European country that doesn't use it
With the exception of people over 70, the UK has pretty uniformly moved to the American system. All of our govt statistics, corporate finances info, day-to-day conversations involving billions refer to "one thousand million"
Macha · 2h ago
Same in Ireland, the long scale was already an elderly person thing when I was a child
swores · 2h ago
UK used to do it the European way, but has adopted American way since (IIRC) about 50 years ago. As a Brit I wish we still used the traditional way.
(And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)
randomtoast · 2h ago
It may take fifty years, but I think that you will eventually rejoin the EU.
swores · 1h ago
I definitely hope so! (And hope it won't take that long, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
tim333 · 1h ago
Or whatever the thing is then.
867-5309 · 1h ago
>imagine my disappointment when I left home for university, got access to computers and the World Wide Web, and discovered that the names I had learnt were off by several orders of magnitude
imagine discovering mega- giga- tera- then not mentioning them
flysand7 · 2d ago
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"?
solstice · 2h ago
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...
ripe · 1h ago
> 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).
myriad scale - based on 10.000
mid-scale - based on 10⁸
long scale - based on doubling of exponent (4, 8, 16, 32, ..)
luismedel · 1h ago
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).
tiagod · 23m ago
>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.
gpderetta · 2h ago
In Italian, "billion" is still normally called "miliardo".
edit: can't spell
Wilder7977 · 2h ago
Small typo, but it's "Miliardo" (one "l").
kaliszad · 2h ago
Czech does as well, milion, miliarda, bilion, biliarda...
ozgung · 2h ago
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.
fsniper · 1h ago
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?
belchiorb · 2h ago
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
tiagod · 19m ago
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.
scotty79 · 2h ago
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.
In Czech, which uses the long scale, yes. The equivalent of "milliardaire".
aaron695 · 50m ago
The Economist (British) changed from million million -> thousand million in (1944) -
"If it is objected that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation"
The US leading the way in a sensible measuring system.
tiagod · 9m ago
This was flagged. I vouched for it as it has an interesting insight, even if you find the joke unnecessary.
I did however not find the quote via Google search. Can you share the source?
This is the key piece of information for making sense of it. Ultimately the OP's insight is that the number-naming system used in the west is thousands based instead of millions based, but came to that by observing the number-naming outcomes instead of the source notation that led to it.
It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.
10000^1 = 万 10000^2 = 億 10000^3 = 兆 10000^4 = 京
When I talk Swedish I think in terms of long scale, 24 h clock, SI units.
When I talk English I think in terms of short scale, 12 h clock, imperial units.
It's like different cultural basis vectors.
He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
Why didn't this principle win?
(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
¿Que es un millón? Mil miles.
¿Que es un billón? Un millón de millones.
¿Que es un semillón? ???
Una semilla muy grande.
With the exception of people over 70, the UK has pretty uniformly moved to the American system. All of our govt statistics, corporate finances info, day-to-day conversations involving billions refer to "one thousand million"
(And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)
imagine discovering mega- giga- tera- then not mentioning them
Chinese:
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).
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).
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.
edit: can't spell
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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_milliardaires_du_mon...
"If it is objected that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation"
The US leading the way in a sensible measuring system.
I did however not find the quote via Google search. Can you share the source?
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