Comments

Cyril wrote:

In French, we use the long scale almost as is. We have milliard, trilliard, etc.

We always have to convert the English's billion to French's milliard, and so on. Yet, we haven't learned the rule for the "scale", since there's none for the long scale's -iard numbers. Each multiple-of-3 power of 10 has a name and that's it.

Raúl Ward wrote:

In Spanish speaking countries, a billion is a million millions.

The problem is that sometimes, when translating news or articles from English, they do it literally, so an English billion (one thousand millions) is put in Spanish as a "billón" (a million millions). That is a source of mistaken amounts.

Jon wrote:

I'm from Denmark were we use the long scale. I didn't know a long scale form existed in English! It happens quite often that a billion, in English, gets translated to a billion in Danish, which is off by \( 999 \times 10^9, \) and of course, should have been a milliard. ;-)