Talk:Number names

Are there any countries besides the US and Canada which use the American definition of "billion"? How about Australia? What about french-Canada? Philippines?

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The UK has now adopted the North American billion. I don't know whether the process was formalised, but a billion is nearly always 10⁹ here.

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Wow, this is big news, then all the pages about number names are wrong. Are there any references?

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Well if you take "The (London) Times" coverage of the last government budget, all the references to billions there are 10⁹ : http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,584-95524,00

Similarly, if you read the last official budget statement its clear that they either a) use the US billion or b) This is the richest country ever... (60 million people, 2.5 billion spending increase would be 40,000 GBP per capita, or about twice the average income :)) http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/budget2001/fsbr/chap1

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In Australia, these days everyone uses the American billion. -- Simon J Kissane

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It makes sense to use the American system because it has finer granularity to be useful in the financial and statistical settings. The British system is probably good to use in astronomy only.

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Sounds to me like the number pages need to be changed appropriately--retaining information about the old British system, of course... --LMS

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Done. --AxelBoldt

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Does anyone know when Britain and Australia switched to the American system? I'm too young to remember it happening here in Australia, but I know it happened at some stage... -- Simon J Kissane

I don't think there was an explicit switchover, it just happened, probably by exposure to US media. They were still teaching European billions back in the late 1980s whilst I was at primary school. --Robert Merkel

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In South Africa you use the American system when you speak English and the European system when you speak Afrikaans - maybe that's why our currency has gone down the drain recently ... clasqm

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The article still says "the American system" vs. "the European system"... I'm not sure exactly how this needs to be changed, but it does look like it needs to be changed. --LMS

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Why is it claimed that the Japanese system does away with the redundancy of number names? They seem to need more words than the European system, and slightly less than the American system. --AxelBoldt

They have no "teen" words, and no "twenty", "thirty", ... "ninety" words.

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zero

In English the word no can function like a number.

One can ask "How many apples are there in the fruit bowl" and get the answer "There are no apples in the fruit bowl".

As such no is a synomym of zero.

Zero can only be used a predicate in a sentence, but no can not be used that way.

• The number of applies is zero.
• There are no apples.

what does "zed" mean?

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Removed this from the article, because it's completely confusing, and explained further down more clearly:

In the European system a billion is a million million, a trillion is a million billion, and so forth; a thousand billion is called a billiard, a thousand trillion a trilliard etc. In the American system a billion is a thousand million, a trillion is a thousand billion, and so forth. See more below.

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There should be at least a link to some of the Mathematics of really large numbers. For example, the infamous arrow notation, such as 3^^^^3 which describes a really large number, but I forget the details.

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This article needs to be refactored -- it is too long, and covers several topics. However, there's lots of good material in it!