How big is a billion?

Omnutia

I saw this today (flickr gets its two billionth picture) and was like "Wow! one picture for every three and a bit people in the world!" but then I look down the list and someones typed 2 billion wrong. It only has 9 zero's instead of 12 then I keep scrolling and more and more people have written two thousand million instead of two billion and I thought it was some kind of prank. I checked in my head and was sure that 1 billion was one million million; Otherwise there would be no room for one hundred thousand but I look it up on wikipedia and travesty! We have one number with two values!!
There was a link to an article about Long and Short Scale numbering methods and it turns out that for years people may have been getting really big and really small numbers wrong by an order of magnitude.
I wanted to know is a billion a billion and or is a billion one thousand million where you are?
also, does this mean the worlds population is 1,000 times smaller than I had previously thought?

Rym

One billion is 1 000 000 000 in the United States. ^_~

thaneofcawdor

Did you honestly think there were six million million people on Earth? Ouch. They'd be stacking people 3-high.

That said, I have heard people refer to (what most people would regard as) a billion as a thousand million, but not recently.

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

A billion is defined as being one thousand million, or 1,000,000,000. If you think differently, you're doing it wrong.

merry_minstrel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
Damn you English speaking people and your imprecise use of language.

...

Abillion is defined as being one thousand million, or 1,000,000,000. If you think differently, you're doing it wrong.

Or you think in Long Scale. In Dutch I think een biljoen is 12 zero's. But nobody ever uses it, so nobody really knows. Wikipedia says 12. So we use the long scale. I hereby claim that long scale > short scale, as metric > English system.

Omnutia

Metric > Imperial*
It just completely shags me out when people take a system which is concise and logical and twist it to be utterly useless.
The population of earth is six thousand million. Just so you all know.

...

Ah, it's called Imperial. Hehe, never knew that n_n;; thanks. Perhaps we should start prepending the scale to the number? i.e. 6 Imperial Billion

MrRoboto

Here a billion is a million millions, i thought the word was created to the same effect as a million was created to describe a thousand thousands or a thousand to describe a hundred hundreds, etc. I mean, i can say five hundred thousand eight hundred and fifty four million nine hundred thousand five hundred and eighty (im pretty sure i misspelled that) without using the word billion. I guess it doesn't make any sense. Just wanted to say here 1 billion is a million millions

Anastius

...a thousand to describe a hundred hundreds...

Uh, no. A thousand is ten hundreds.

MrRoboto

lol.... you are indeed right

Omnutia

Possibly we need to introduce a digital scale where each time requires a doubling of zeros.

...

Possibly we need to introduce a digital scale where each time requires a doubling of zeros.

Hmmm... sounds easier then learning Metric time.

merry_minstrel

Well, I use powers of ten anyway, can't go wrong that way. I actually say 10⁹.

Omnutia

OMGs!! I'm a 10^6aire!
You can't hold 1*10^1!!