Million Times Million
64 comments
·July 9, 2025danbruc
alberth
So basically
2 commas = "Millions"
3 commas = "Billions"
4 commas = ...tardismechanic
I'm sorry it had to be done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIB5HEcZBs8
cmcconomy
Thanks!
This is the key piece of information for making sense of it. Ultimately the OP's insight is that the number-naming system used in the west is thousands based instead of millions based, but came to that by observing the number-naming outcomes instead of the source notation that led to it.
pilaf
Spanish uses the long scale, but lately I've been noticing people mistakenly using the short scale in Spanish more and more, likely due to the influence of English and the internet, sometimes even in news articles and other "professional" publications. You may see someone speaking of "un trillón de dólares" (a trillion dollars), which while it makes sense in English when speaking of federal budgets or the market cap of FAANG, in long scale that's more than the world's entire money supply.
It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.
mattigames
It's only "mistakenly" until it becomes the norm, which as another Spanish speaking person, I bet that will be the case no long in the future.
Aardwolf
In Dutch the word "miljard" for 10^9 is too well known and deeply ingrained to change I think, but with "triljoen" which could either mean 10^18 or a direct conversion from the American English trillion, all bets are off
pilaf
Yeah, I too think that's likely the direction we're heading, and I'd be fine with either option as long as it was consistently used, this transitional phase is just painful.
mattigames
In the meanwhile you can say one thousand millions (for what Americans call a billion), like the local tv news does, and for the bigger one say just say millions of millions (what Americans call a trillion), that should be unambiguous enough.
vincnetas
TIL about one more thing US misunderstood and now we have to deal with it. Another one is command key on mac, "borrowed" from road sign indicating "sight seeing place" :)
justusthane
I don't see how borrowing the Swedish "point of interest" symbol for the command key is "misunderstanding" something - as I understand the story, they just liked the symbol and decided to use it.
Also, I'm certainly not a US apologist, but I also don't see how the US using the short scale is a case of misunderstanding - it sounds like they just decided that it makes more sense that way (and I would agree, although maybe that's just because I'm used to it).
eviks
What was misunderstood in the command key? The link mentions nothing of the sorts
mynti
this is so funny because i always envied english for it being so clear: million, billion, trillion. in german we have these "awkward" names in between: million, milliarden, billionen, billiarden. but now hearing about this long scale it actually does make quite a lot more sense when thinking about it in multiples of millions
3036e4
Swedish does that as well. miljon, miljard, biljon, biljard.
This is sufficiently confusing to people that every time I see a newspaper article mention something is a biljon of something they have to mention how much it is and remind readers to not confuse it with an American billion (that is only a miljard).
In most contexts when big numbers like those show up though the metric-system comes to the rescue, since things will be referred to as being a mega-something or giga-something etc anyway. That works great until Americans attempt to do it and get the letters wrong or use K instead of k or M instead of m that causes new confusion and then we're back at having to guess what something means depending on what side of the Atlantic it was written.
krawcu
same in polish milion, miliard, bilion, biliard, trylion, tryliard, kwadrylion, kwadryliard...
mc32
I think they forgot "thousandard" = 1,000,000. And million is a thousandard of those.
GolDDranks
And in East Asia, we use a system based on exponents of 10000. I kind of like it, except when I have to think about it and the short/long scales at the same time.
10000^1 = 万 10000^2 = 億 10000^3 = 兆 10000^4 = 京
HocusLocus
As a kid I stressed our Olivetti divisumma 24 ( https://www.ithistory.org/sites/default/files/hardware/Olive... ) with a million times a million. It entered a perpetual mechanical cycle that even unplugging it could not break. Finally Dad had to attack its innards and tug and twiddle until he pulled out a spring loaded gear and it caught a cog on the next go-round. It lifted its digit arms and printed out a 'partial answer' that was a series of random numbers as wide as the whole mechanism.
He said "please don't do that again." I moved on to torture computers.
marginalia_nu
I just seamlessly switch scales and units with the language.
When I talk Swedish I think in terms of long scale, 24 h clock, SI units.
When I talk English I think in terms of short scale, 12 h clock, imperial units.
It's like different cultural basis vectors.
lgl
Numberphile did a video on this many years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ
eviks
Long scale seems to be much better because you have to remember fewer prefixes, so with fewer easier to remember rules you get wider coverage
Why didn't this principle win?
WindyMiller
On the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable.
(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)
javier_e06
I Spanish language we have this dad joke:
¿Que es un millón? Mil miles.
¿Que es un billón? Un millón de millones.
¿Que es un semillón? ???
Una semilla muy grande.
joarv0249nw
"Mr. President, two Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq." "Oh my god... How many is a Brazilian?"
witrak
It is used in all European countries (I don't know any European country that doesn't use it). I know the long scale under the name "European" and the short scale as "American".
OtherShrezzing
>I don't know any European country that doesn't use it
With the exception of people over 70, the UK has pretty uniformly moved to the American system. All of our govt statistics, corporate finances info, day-to-day conversations involving billions refer to "one thousand million"
Macha
Same in Ireland, the long scale was already an elderly person thing when I was a child
swores
UK used to do it the European way, but has adopted American way since (IIRC) about 50 years ago. As a Brit I wish we still used the traditional way.
(And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)
randomtoast
It may take fifty years, but I think that you will eventually rejoin the EU.
swores
I definitely hope so! (And hope it won't take that long, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
tim333
Or whatever the thing is then.
intpx
Oh thanks for completely breaking my numeracy. Gotta relearn maths real quick
According to Wikipedia the two variants exist because the digits of large numbers used to be grouped into groups of six digits but in order to improve readability this was eventually changed to groups of three digits and some insisted that with that also the naming should be adjusted. A long scale trillion has three digit groups when using groups of six digits (1,000000,000000,000000) and six after the switch to groups of three (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) which then should be a short scale sextillion but somehow it ended up as a quintillion.