billion
Language: English
Part of speech: num
Pronunciation: enpr: bĭl'yən
ipa: /ˈbɪljən/
rhymes: -ɪljən
Forms: form: billions
head_nr: 1
Etymology: From French billion, from bi- (“two”) + -illion.
Senses: examples: text: At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds (£7,000,000,000).
ref: 1921 January 24, “National Finances”, in Devon and Exeter Gazette, page 5:
text: 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.
ref: 2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8837, page 74:
text: 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 usual
ref: 2019 October, Dan Harvey, “HS2 costs rise as schedule slips”, in Modern Railways, page 9:
text: 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.
ref: 2023 May 18, Reuters, “Chipmakers look to Japan as worries about China grow”, in CNN Business:
text: 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.
ref: 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:
text: Plaintiff States also receive billions of dollars in funds every year directly from Treasury through BFS under federal grant programs.
ref: 2025 February 8, “COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF”, in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, page 2:
head_nr: 2
glosses: Either of two large amounts:
a thousand million (logic: 1,000 × 1,000²): 1 followed by nine zeros, 10⁹.
synonyms: milliard
thousand million
qualifier: modern British & Australian; short scale; modern British & Australian; short scale
examples: text: n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million
ref: 1778, 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:
text: 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.
ref: 2000 November 8, Stephen Ladyman, “[Speech to the House of Commons]”, in Hansard:
head_nr: 2
glosses: Either of two large amounts:
A million (times a) million (logic: 1,000,000²): a 1 followed by twelve zeros (10¹²); a thousand milliard.
synonyms: trillion[short scale]]>
qualifier: British & Australian; long scale; British & Australian; long scale
examples: text: Near-synonyms: gazillion; see also Thesaurus:zillion
text: There were billions of people at the concert.
head_nr: 2
glosses: An unspecified very large number.
Coordinate terms: thousand
million
milliard
thousand million
trillion
quadrillion
quintillion
sextillion
Derived terms: Barbillion
billionaire
billion-dollar grass
billion-dollar question
billion laughs
Boring Billion
centibillion
golden billion
megabillion
multi-billion
multibillion
multibillions
Related terms: word: trillion
word: coined at same time
word: zillion
word: coined after the series million
word: quadrillion
word: gazillion
word: same origin
word: -illion
sense: short scale
word: Previous: million. Next trillion.
sense: long scale
word: Previous: milliard. Next billiard.
sense: ISO prefix
word: giga-