Kaixo!
On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 10:13:41AM -0400, Delirium wrote:
"Thousand million" sounds a bit odd though. If I saw "thousand million", I would expect to see a footnote explaining why this odd choice of wording was used instead of "billion",
Because a billion is not a thousand million but a thousand thousand million maybe :-)
The US English usage of "billion" and "trillion" is archaic (the same holds for most of the measuring units used in the USA); of all the languages I know all use the modern meanings of billion and trillion, that is, 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 respectively.
Now I came accostumed to it, but when I first read things like "a billion dollar" I was shocked to read about a so huge amount of money; well, it was actually a thousand times smaller amount than it was written; now I know that US newpapers always grossly exagerate ands that big amounts have to be shrinked a thousand times to have the real amount :-)