[sammyoos]

The designation of trillion is ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion

[philomath_mn]

Same for one billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

I've never heard someone use the long scale, it is only ever mentioned as a novelty. I think the scientific community, at the very least, has standardized on the short scale.

[rob74]

The long scale is far from just a novelty, most European countries other than the UK use it. Actually I thought it was used in all non-English-speaking countries, but Wikipedia showed me that the situation is far more complicated than I thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/F...

Besides short scale and long scale, there is a sizable "short scale with milliard instead of billion" fraction, and of course some countries (China, India, Japan, Greece) have completely different systems. Most interesting is that Portugal uses the long scale, while Brazil uses the short scale. That must be confusing...

[pxndxx]

The long scale is common in French, German and Spanish for example. English usually uses the short scale. The scientific community uses SI prefixes, which aren't part of either scale (you don't say a billion joules which is ambiguous, you either say a terajoule for a long-scale billion or a gigajoule for a short-scale one).

[tzot]

OTOH the phrase “a thousand million” for 10⁹ is not that uncommon. From what I've seen, in places where billions/trillions are mentioned and it's important that the number is accurately specified, a representation with digits or the exponent of 10 are typically provided.

[FabHK]

Agreed that the short scale has become more prevalent, lamentably. I find 6n more pleasing than 3n+3.

[phkahler]

>> Same for one billion:

So that's how the US government will make the mult-trillion dollar debt go away. They'll just call it Billions.

[whimsicalism]

my understanding is the long scale has largely died out

think it is more than permissible to use what is scientifically standard (trillion = 10^12)

[Tor3]

Died out in English. Not in other languages where long scale was and is used, that hasn't changed at all. I'm not aware of any other language shifting from long scale to short scale (for languages traditionally using long scale).

[tzot]

“Scientifically standard” are the SI prefixes. So, given the ambiguity of what 1 gigastar is (1/1000th of 1 terastar or a really huge star?) one should say “10¹²s of stars” maybe.