In Dutch, a 1000 million is called a 'miljard'. Above that, 1000 miljard, is
called 1 biljoen. As you can see, 1 'biljoen' sounds pretty much the same
(in Dutch) to 'billion' - hence, the confusion :)

btw, 1000 biljoen is 1 biljard :)
Martijn Tonies
InterBase Workbench - the developer tool for InterBase and Firebird
http://www.interbaseworkbench.com <http://www.interbaseworkbench.com/>

On Wednesday 2001-11-21 at 23:00:14 -0500, Doug Chamberlin wrote:

> At 11/21/2001 10:38 PM (Wednesday), Helen Borrie wrote:
> >Only in the USA. Out here in the globe, it is a million millions or
> >10^12. That's why most of the billionaires in the world live in the USA.
:))
>
> Refresh my memory: What is 1,000 million (10^9) called outside the USA?

That's right! That's what they call it: one thousand million. If you
actually need to ensure people understand what you mean when you have an
international audience (and even not), use 1000 million. At least
everyone knows how much that actually is. Now... if I were to hand out
one of Bill Gates' 10 dollar notes every second, how many 1000 million
years would that take?

David Trudgett




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