Rant About English Number Names

Would you say that 10 is a hundred? or that 100 is a thousand? How about 1,000; is that a hundred thousand? Then why in the hell is 1,000,000,000, i.e. a thousand million, called a billion?

I just don’t get it. And sure, there are other languages that do stupid stuff with counting. Like French and their way of saying eighty as quatre-vingts, literally four-twenties; or ninety-nine as quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, four-twenty-nineteen. Or Danish and their halvfjerds for seventy, which means half of the fourth twenty (3.5 × 20), or halvfems for ninety (half of the fifth twenty, 4.5 × 20).¹ But see, that’s a smart way of being stupid; it’s a convoluted way of saying the actual numbers.

But in English? No. This is a stupid way of being stupid. A thousand million will be a billion, period. I did a little digging and it turns out it was actually the French the ones who fucked it up first.

In 1484, Nicolas Chuquet wrote Triparty en la science des nombres, unpublished in his lifetime. Most of it was copied without attribution by Estienne de La Roche in his 1520 textbook. In that manuscript, Chuquet states that the groups of digits can be called “million, the second mark byllion, the third mark tryllion… and so on as far as you wish to go.” So the long scale naming is his, and a byllion in his system meant 10¹².

During the 17th century it became common practice in France to divide digits into groups of 3, and during this time billion began to be used as the name for 10⁹ in France and Italy. French mathematicians decided to switch to this usage because they found it easier. It was called the short scale.

This meaning of billion migrated to the British American colonies in the early 1700s, and became common in France during the early 1800s. The billion=10¹² system was adopted in England, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe. But then France officially adopted the short scale in 1948 before reverting to the long scale in 1961 via government decree.

The USeños got the short sclae and stuck with it. Then they became the top economy in the world. So that’s why.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. I just wanted to rant about it.