Are there any countries besides the US and Canada which use the American definition of "billion"? How about Australia?
What about french-Canada? Philippines?
The UK has now adopted the North American billion. I don't know whether the process was formalised, but a billion is nearly always 10
9 here.
Wow, this is big news, then all the pages about number names are wrong. Are there any references?
Well if you take "The (London) Times" coverage of the last government budget, all the references to billions there are 10
9 :
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,584-95524,00.html
Similarly, if you read the last official budget statement its clear that they either a) use the US billion or b) This is the richest country ever... (60 million people, 2.5 billion spending increase would be 40,000 GBP per capita, or about twice the average income :)) http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/budget2001/fsbr/chap1.html
In Australia, these days everyone uses the American billion. --
Simon J Kissane
It makes sense to use the American system because it has finer granularity to be useful in the financial and statistical settings. The British system is probably good to use in astronomy only.
Sounds to me like the number pages need to be changed appropriately--retaining information about the old British system, of course... --
LMS
Done. --
AxelBoldt
Does anyone know when Britain and Australia switched to the American system? I'm too young to remember it happening here in Australia, but I know it happened at some stage... --
Simon J Kissane
The article still says "the American system" vs. "the European system"... I'm not sure
exactly how this needs to be changed, but it does look like it needs to be changed. --
LMS
Why is it claimed that the Japanese system does away with the redundancy of number names? They seem to need more words than the European system, and slightly less than the American system. --
AxelBoldt
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