billion
num/ˈbɪljən/ · AU /ˈbɪ(l)jən/
Etymology From French billion, equivalent to bi- (“two”) + -illion.
› Either of two large amounts:
1
US a thousand million (logic: 1,000 × 1,000²): 1 followed by nine zeros, 10⁹.
Modern British & Australian; short scale; modern British & Australian; short scale
- At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds (£7,000,000,000).1921 January 24, “National Finances”, in Devon and Exeter Gazette, page 5:
- In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result.2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8837, page 74:
4 more examples
- However, despite the prospect of HS2 being curtailed and the revelation that the programme is late and billions over budget, for now, at least, work on the scheme appears to be business as usual2019 October, Dan Harvey, “HS2 costs rise as schedule slips”, in Modern Railways, page 9:
- Micron said in a statement that it would bring extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology to Japan, becoming the first semiconductor company to do so, and expected to invest up to 500 billion yen ($3.6 billion) with support from the Japanese government.2023 May 18, Reuters, “Chipmakers look to Japan as worries about China grow”, in CNN Business:
- The ChatGPT service which serves as Web front-end to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was the fastest-growing service in history to break the 100 million user milestone in January and had 1 billion visits by February 2023.2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays” (18617), in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 1:
- Plaintiff States also receive billions of dollars in funds every year directly from Treasury through BFS under federal grant programs.2025 February 8, “COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF”, in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, page 2:
2
Dated A million (times a) million (logic: 1,000,000²): a 1 followed by twelve zeros (10¹²); a thousand milliard.
British & Australian; long scale; British & Australian; long scale
- n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million1778, Francis Maseres, “A Method of Finding, by the Help of Sir Isaac Newton's Binomial Theorem, a Near Value of the very Slowly Converging Infinite Series …”, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, volume lxviii, number xli:
- There is a bill to be picked up for cleaning the former Soviet countries of £1 billion. By that I mean a British billion, because when I was little I was told that a billion was a million million and then the Americans said that it was a thousand million. Well, I am talking about a million million pounds worth of clean-up to be done.2000 November 8, Stephen Ladyman, “[Speech to the House of Commons]”, in Hansard:
3
Colloquial, Excessive An unspecified very large number.
- Near-synonyms: gazillion; see also Thesaurus:zillion
- There were billions of people at the concert.
- Derived terms
- billionaire, billion-dollar grass, billion-dollar question, billion laughs, Boring Billion, centibillion, golden billion, megabillion, multi-billion, multibillion, multibillions
- Related terms
- trillion, coined at same time, zillion, coined after the series million, quadrillion, gazillion, same origin, -illion, Previous: million. Next trillion., Previous: milliard. Next billiard., giga-
- Coordinate terms
- thousand, million, milliard, thousand million, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion