Millions, Billions, Trillions and Millillions

Here’s a bit of history about the words we use for numbers big enough to describe world populations and budgets.

The word “million” started to be used in about the 13th century. Before then, writers needing to express large numbers would use phrases such as “a thousand thousands,” as in Daniel 7:10 in the Old Testament. By 1400, however, the word “Million” was well and truly in the English language, meaning 100000, or a thousand thousands.

In the late 15ths century, some Fremch mathematicians began to experiment with names for larger numbers. Bymillion and Trimillion (literally from the Latin for two millions and three millions) became byllion and tryllion. A byllion meant a million times a million, and a tryllion was a million times more again. These new words for big numbers were joined by quadryllion, quillion, sixlion, septyllion and so forth, following the Latin words quattuor, quinque, sex, septem etc for 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on.

In the 17th century, however, some writers began to use “billion” to mean, not a million millions, but only a thousand millions. Similarly, they would use the word “trillion” to mean only a thousand billions. There were now two different sets of meanings for words like billion, trillion, quadrillion and so forth. The long scale gave them their bigger (more historical) values, the short scale their smaller, newer values.

It was only in the 20th century that numbers as big as these became needed in regular use, so it was only in the 20th century that governments began to make official declarations about what a “billion” would be. Hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s prompted the German government to side down on the logn scale. At the same time, the French decided that a billion would have just nine zeroes. The British disagreed. The United States followed the French, who later changed their minds. The British (and therefore Australians too) also gradually switched from the long scale to the short scale.

This is why, in Australia,

  • in the 1940s, children were taught that a billion is a million million,
  • in the 1970s, that it might be a thousand million if you’re talking to an American,
  • and today, that the Americans were right all along, a billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion.

We can still generate larger and larger number names by counting in Latin, so

  • A quadrillion is a thousand trillion
  • A quintillion is a thousand quadrillion
  • A sextillion is a thousand quintillion

and so on. These are big numbers. A septillion sheets of paper, stacked up, would reach fromn the earth to the edge of the galaxy.

Our modern system for naming numbers means that if you write the digit 1, followed by 3003 zeroes, you get a number with a delightful name – the millillion. A millillion is as much bigger than a million as, well, pretty much anything is bigger than anything. You’d have to multiply a million by itself 1000 times to even get close!