The Off Topic Topic

[Maladict]

To be fair, Josq just wants to return to the UK before 1948.

Fyp

[mongers]

A billion is not 1000 million but a million million.

Hillary or Sav, tell me what this means.  I thought he wanted to change the meaning of "billion" from 1,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000.

Traditionally, and for longer in the UK, a million was a though thousand, a billion a million millions, a trillion a billion billions, etc.  That led to some very awkwardly long numbers, though, so the French, and later the US, adopted the power of three system where everything above a thousand was a multiple of a thousand.  That only became the international norm post-WW2.

This.

And in fact it was somewhat later for many in the UK; I learnt in O and A-level mathematics that a billion was a million millions. Likely sometime in the early 80s my generation would adopted the new international standard.

[Sheilbh]

Traditionally, and for longer in the UK, a million was a though thousand, a billion a million millions, a trillion a billion billions, etc.  That led to some very awkwardly long numbers, though, so the French, and later the US, adopted the power of three system where everything above a thousand was a multiple of a thousand.  That only became the international norm post-WW2.

I once had to some work from Indian sources and I was (and still am) absolutely bamboozled by lakhs and crores