Problems with numbers

 

One thing that must always be explained very carefully to Spanish students is that an English billion is not a Spanish billón. The English word refers to a figure of one thousand million (1,000,000,000 or 10⁹) while the Spanish billón is one million million (1,000,000,000,000 or 10¹²). I have seen Spanish newspaper reports of billones de dólares that have obviously been taken directly from an English-language report of billions of dollars and should have been put in Spanish as miles de millones de dólares. The word milliard, used in some languages for 1,000,000,000, is not used in English.

One billion (or one thousand milliard) Reichsmarks, 5 November 1923

I was reminded of this today by a letter in the Guardian suggesting that confusion between the Indian lakh (100,000) and million may have led to serious confusion about the number of people killed in Bangladesh’s liberation war.

It is especially important to be accurate with numbers. Unlike words they have no context; while a typo, spelling mistake or slip of the tongue can usually be corrected mentally to the obvious meaning, a number usually stands alone or has a context that is not immediately apparent.

Comments

[armado]

In the United States a billion is a thousand million.

[Peter Harvey]

Damn. Got it wrong way round. Now corrected.

[Ronnie]

Peter

Don't we now in the UK, at least in the economics and business pages, use the American billion for a thousand million and their trillion for an old imperial billion? A quadrilliion then is a thousand million million, or an old dance, and a postillion the fellow who was struck by lightning.

Ronnie

[Peter Harvey]

Ronnie,

Yes, you're right. As you will see, it has been corrected.

[Peter Harvey]

And the postillion struck by lightning is discussed here: http://lavengro.typepad.com/peter_harvey_linguist/2010/03/of-phrasebooks-battleship-lieutenants-and-lightning-struck-postillions.html