Quote:
Originally Posted by hwlester
I'm not sure about current usage, but I think "billion" and "trillion" were US inventions. I've always heard them referred to as "thousand million" and "million million" respectively on British TV.
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Originally, British English used billion for million million (and occasionally the European milliard for thousand million), but the US use of billion for thousand million has been used instead for many years [decades] now instead.
Edit: These are called the
long and short scales.