How many millions you need to make a billion?

Answer 1

It depends where you are!

In the U.S. "one billion" = 10^9, so it takes a thousand millions to make one billion.

In the U.K. "one billion" = 10^12, so it takes a million millions to make one billion.

There's often some confusion about this when Americans and Britons get together or are swapping information.

To add further to the confusion, Germans for example call the U.S. billion "milliard," while using the same "billion" as the Brits. The Brits have no single word term for the U.S. billion --- they simply call it "a thousand million."

[Indians don't have a term for a million; they DO have separate terms for 10^5 (the lakh, a hundred thousand) and 10^7 (the crore, ten million). Note that 100 lakhs = 1 crore, so that beyond the (anomalous?) "thousand", the named Indian units increase only by successive factors of 100 instead of the West's 1000.]

Live long and prosper.

P.S. I was both surprised and very interested to learn from 'Raymond,' below, that the "milliard" is indeed an English word for "a thousand million." My surprise was in good part because, in more than 60 years of fascination with numbers, I do not recall ONCE hearing or reading it in an English source. [ My first (failed) research project, with a boyhood friend at age 4 or so, was to write out all the integers successively until we reached the largest one (!) ]

Getting back to a mere "milliard" --- ironically, the Yahoo! Answers spell-checker just queried it as a proper spelling, suggesting various alternatives for substitution.

I have to conclude that while "milliard" may exist in the dictionary, to all intents and purposes it isn't used in practice. Politicians, governmenmt spokesmen, the BBC and newapapers in England routinely use "thousand million" when referring to budgets, defence outlays, etc. I think that I would have been brought up sharply had any such source ever used "milliard." As I implied, I think it's effectively obsolete (which presumes that it once really did have some currency).

Answer 2

There is a "short-scale" billion (as used in the USA) which is a thousand million. Recently, it has started to infect other English speaking countries. The classical English word for this value is a milliard.

There is the "long-scale" billion, used in the rest of the world. It is a million million. It is based on powers of a million.
A million raised to the second power (a million million) is a billion, from the latin "bis" meaning twice.
A million raised to the third power (a million million million) is a trillion, from the latin "ter" meaning three times.
...to the fourth power is a quadrillion,
...the the fifth power, a quintillion, etc.
One can extend the list as needed:
million^8 = octillion (octo means eight) = 10^48 (a 1 followed by 48 zeroes).

The long-scale is more logical. The short-scale allows numbers to sound more impressive.

See link below for a comparison of the two systems

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PS
"Milliard: A thousand million, usually called a billion in America."
The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, Consolidated Book Publishers, Chicago (1971)

Answer 3

In the US, a thousand million is called a billion. (1*10^9)

In most of the world, a million million is called a billion. (1*10^12)

That is why scientists use scientific notation.

Answer 4

One thousand millions = one billion.

Answer 5

1000

Answer 6

1,000