It’s not exactly a new mistake, but it’s striking that so many media outlets around the world keep tripping over the same stone after so long. Whether out of enthusiasm or necessity, they rush to repeat the word “trillion” without checking that the news comes from a country that uses a different system. This detail brings us to two concepts: the short scale and the long scale. What do they mean? How many zeros does a trillion really have?.
A Lot of Money, Really
It all started with a high-profile president’s speech, in which he announced several economic and social assistance initiatives. Many traditional media decided to reproduce that speech almost verbatim, and more than a few journalists repeated with astonishment the phrase “trillions of dollars.” What’s the problem?
This is a true classic: the trillion in that country is not the same as the trillion used in much of continental Europe and Latin America. The solution to differentiate between the two trillions lies in the concepts of short scale and long scale. For applying “small” numbers, the scales are fundamentally identical, but everything changes once we cross the barrier of 999,999,999…
How Many Zeros Does a Trillion Have? It Depends
To start… a brief history lesson: The word million entered the English language in the late 14th century (courtesy of a poem written by William Langland), and it is not recorded in any language before the 13th century. However, what interests us most is the work of the French mathematician Jehan Adam. It was in 1475 that Adam used the expressions bymillion and trimillion to describe 10^12 and 10^18 respectively, and another French mathematician named Nicolas Chuquet expanded those definitions to reach the nonyllion, 10^54..
From the 16th and 17th centuries onward, the first differences emerge: two French mathematicians, Guillaume Budé and Jacques Pelletier du Mans, used the expression milliart as equivalent to 10^9 and 10^12 in less than 35 years. The first documented use of milliard as 10^9 occurred in the Netherlands in 1676, and the transformation of billion into 10^9 materialized in the Thirteen Colonies during the 18th century. The first American publication of billion as equivalent to 10^9 appeared in 1729, with the work of Professor Isaac Greenwood of Harvard College.
Short Scale / Long Scale: In Summary
Short Scale
- Billion / billion / 10^9, a thousand million, 1,000,000,000
- Trillion / trillion / 10^12, a thousand times a thousand million, 1,000,000,000,000
Long Scale
- Billion / billion / 10^12, a thousand times a thousand million, 1,000,000,000,000
- Trillion / trillion / 10^18, a thousand million times a thousand million, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil are the main countries that favor the short scale. Spain, most of Europe, and almost all of Latin America use the long scale. Two interesting exceptions are Canada (billion = 10^9 in English and billion = 10^12 in French) and Puerto Rico, which separates its usage into economic (billion = 10^9), technical (billion = 10^12), and export (10^9 = millardo, 10^12 = billón). I hope this text is useful to clear up any doubts.
More info: Wikipedia
https://old.neoteo.com/mathway/
