Word definition: billion

Etimology


From French billion, from bi- (“two”) +‎ -illion.

numeral


billion (plural billions)

(US, modern British & Australian, short scale) a thousand million (logic: 1,000 × 1,0002): 1 followed by nine zeros, 109; a milliard

(dated, British & Australian, long scale) A million million (logic: 1,000,0002): a 1 followed by twelve zeros; 1012

(colloquial, hyperbolic) An unspecified very large number.

Examples


At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds .

In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result.

However, despite the prospect of HS2 being curtailed and the revelation that the programme is late and billions over budget, for now, at least, work on the scheme appears to be business as usual

The ChatGPT service which serves as Web front-end to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was the fastest-growing service in history to break the 100 million user milestone in January and had 1 billion visits by February 2023.

n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million

There is a bill to be picked up for cleaning the former Soviet countries of £1 billion. By that I mean a British billion, because when I was little I was told that a billion was a million million and then the Americans said that it was a thousand million. Well, I am talking about a million million pounds worth of clean-up to be done.

There were billions of people at the concert.

Related words


synonyms

(109): milliard, thousand million

(1012): trillion (short scale)

related terms

trillion, coined at same time

zillion, coined after the series million, billion, trillion, quadrillion (modern slang)

gazillion, from same origin

-illion, from same origin

Data provided by Wiktionary