chabal tetlh submission

billion

Category: Number Accepted
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Description

Current version · February 1, 2019 5:33 pm

1,000 times one million

Discussion

Comments

Responses

  1. While giving us this word, it would be good to offer either the option of the European system that makes a billion a million million instead of a thousand million (giving us more efficient use of words for large numbers — a trillion then being a billion [American million million] billion), or going in the opposite direction based on {netlh} we could have words for "hundred thousand" and "ten million" and "hundred million" and get lots more words for big numbers. Either method works, so long as it gives us a usefully high range of numbers.

    1. Indeed; given that we have unique words for 10^1 through 10^6, it seems unlikely that there would be a specific word for 10^9, unless there are also words for 10^7 or 10^8.

      We can't know for sure at the time, but extrapolating from what we have, it seems that either there is a new word for each factor 10, or the factors are separated by millions (or more), much as many East Asian languages group numbers by myriads.

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