How much is a billion, really?

This might sound like a dumb question in many countries, so let me explain. In most of Europe, a billion is not a billion. The word “billion” in French or German, or “billòn” in Spanish is a number called “trillion” in the US. That’s something Europeans just get used to. When you read billion in English, it means “milliard” in French. But why’s that?

This is because of long and short scales, which are the names of these two power of ten naming systems - Europe and half of Africa are using large scale naming, aka Chuquet’s scale, and the US, Russia, the Middle East and the other half of Africa are using short scale naming.

Ironically, both systems originated from France, and we went from long scale to short scale, and went back to using long scale.