So basically

  2 commas = "Millions"
  3 commas = "Billions"
  4 commas = ...

Thanks!

This is the key piece of information for making sense of it. Ultimately the OP's insight is that the number-naming system used in the west is thousands based instead of millions based, but came to that by observing the number-naming outcomes instead of the source notation that led to it.

It's only "mistakenly" until it becomes the norm, which as another Spanish speaking person, I bet that will be the case no long in the future.

If you want to be unambiguously understood, especially in international context, it seems it's better to avoid words beyond "million" altogether.

"million of millions of dollars" or "ten to the twelfth dollars" or "one tera dollar" or even "one EEE twelve" (for programmers) will always be understood correctly, no matter which part of world listeners are from.

https://brndstudio.medium.com/how-a-swedish-road-sign-inspir...

I don't see how borrowing the Swedish "point of interest" symbol for the command key is "misunderstanding" something - as I understand the story, they just liked the symbol and decided to use it.

Also, I'm certainly not a US apologist, but I also don't see how the US using the short scale is a case of misunderstanding - it sounds like they just decided that it makes more sense that way (and I would agree, although maybe that's just because I'm used to it).

What was misunderstood in the command key? The link mentions nothing of the sorts

I am British and the old scale (million, milliard, etc) makes more sense to me as it allows you to describe much larger numbers with fewer words.

Swedish does that as well. miljon, miljard, biljon, biljard.

This is sufficiently confusing to people that every time I see a newspaper article mention something is a biljon of something they have to mention how much it is and remind readers to not confuse it with an American billion (that is only a miljard).

In most contexts when big numbers like those show up though the metric-system comes to the rescue, since things will be referred to as being a mega-something or giga-something etc anyway. That works great until Americans attempt to do it and get the letters wrong or use K instead of k or M instead of m that causes new confusion and then we're back at having to guess what something means depending on what side of the Atlantic it was written.

I think they forgot "thousandard" = 1,000,000. And million is a thousandard of those.

same in polish milion, miliard, bilion, biliard, trylion, tryliard, kwadrylion, kwadryliard...

same in Italian: milione (1E6), miliardo (1E9), bilione (1E12) etc.. the long scale a "one" is 1E6 bigger than the previous one, example: bilione is 1E6 bigger than milione.

Ah the Myriad system. Curious how the sinosphere adopted this alongside the Greeks.

These do converge I think at

10^12 = Short Trillion/Long Billion

Which makes for some non-frictionless translating since 10^6 and 10^9 are all in-between words, and 10^12 is not a commonly used number to count anything in everyday life.

>I don't know any European country that doesn't use it

With the exception of people over 70, the UK has pretty uniformly moved to the American system. All of our govt statistics, corporate finances info, day-to-day conversations involving billions refer to "one thousand million"

UK used to do it the European way, but has adopted American way since (IIRC) about 50 years ago. As a Brit I wish we still used the traditional way.

(And despite Brexit, UK still is a European country!)

On the other hand, I think short-scale millions and billions are used far more often than the larger numbers, and the starts of words tend to be more salient than the ends, so it's useful to have them distinguished by the first letter instead of the last syllable.

(Plus, "milliard, with an 'ard'" doesn't have the same ring to it.)

Germany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers.

Chinese:

  1 yi
  10 shi
  100 bai
  1000 qian
  10000 wan
  10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand)
  100 x 10000 bai wan (one million)
  1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million)
  1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million)
  10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)

Pretty much all of continental Europe is on long scale. In computing it's masked by SI prefixes. Nobody talks about billion bytes whatever it means.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...

Spain.

But more and more people use "billions" (not billardo, which is our own term for it). The same people that say "diez kas" (for 10k) instead of "diez mil" like they're saving words for doing that (hint: no).

Czech does as well, milion, miliarda, bilion, biliarda...

In Italian, "billion" is still normally called "miliardo".

edit: can't spell

Portugal uses it, but probably due to foreign influence there’s more and more people that use the short scale, which makes everything a mess

Sweden still does (and I believe the other Scandinavians as well).

Same in Turkey. We say Milliard instead of Billion. In my childhood I can swear it was like Million->Milliard->Trillion->Trilliard. They were in daily language because 1 Million Turkish Lira was like a few dollars. At some point they decided Trilliard does not exist and it became something like a Mandela Effect for me. We never used Billion though.

German does.

"Mr. President, two Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq." "Oh my god... How many is a Brazilian?"

I know we're not supposed to complain about being voted down, but this is a case where the downvoters are simply wrong and need to be corrected.

This is a fantastic educational song designed to teach children how big a billion is by using examples involving hamburgers. I promise it will be the best 80's educational rap you hear all day.

[dead]

Milliardaire yes, of course. Why doesn't that sound right to you?

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_milliardaires_du_mon...

In Czech, which uses the long scale, yes. The equivalent of "milliardaire".

Exactly how it's called in french

This was flagged. I vouched for it as it has an interesting insight, even if you find the joke unnecessary.

I did however not find the quote via Google search. Can you share the source?

EDIT: I have found the source! https://archive.org/details/sim_economist_1943-11-06_145_522...

The Economist, November 6, 1943:

>The “Billion”

>This week, for the first time, the note circulation is in excess of £1,000 million. There is, of course, very little real difference between £999 million and £1,001 million—apart from a difficulty for the compositor who works within a narrow column. And yet there is a great psychological barrier, and the setting-down of that extra digit, with its comma following, seems to symbolise the breaking of fresh ground. The totals of revenue and expenditure have, of course, been in ten figures almost ever since the beginning of the war, and the total of the national debt—a rather shadowy notion anyhow—is well into eleven. With the line crossed by a third familiar statistic it is natural to ask what this magnitude of 1,000 million is to be called. There is no word native to these islands. The continental word “milliard” was in some use some years ago, but has not been used very much recently. Well over half the English-speaking peoples, however, use “billion” to mean a thousand million, and if it is objected to this usage that a billion in this country is reserved for the meaning of a million million, then it can be counter-objected that, if so, it is reserved for a use that interests nobody but astronomers and the historians of German inflation. For some time past, The Economist has been using “billion” in American contexts with the American meaning—i.e:, one thousand million. It now seems convenient to extend that usage to British and foreign contexts. Henceforward, in these columns, in the absence of specific indication to the contrary, “billion” means 1 and nine 0’s.