What is million and billion

Billion has two notations, one is 10 9 which is followed in the American system and the other one is 10 12 or 1 followed by 12 zeros which is followed in many non-American countries like French and Germany. In number systems , when you start counting numbers from 0 to 9, 9 to 99, to , and so on, you will observe that as you move forward, you will be introduced to 5 digits, 6 digits, 10 digits numbers , and similar higher numbers.

A billion is a digit number formed by 1 followed by 9 zeros. A billion is defined as a ten-digit number. It is counted after million and carries forward the chain towards trillions.

It is represented as 10 9 , which is the smallest digit number in math. As you know in a number system , counting is always in increasing order. So, the increasing order here is million, billion, and trillion. That means, when we multiply to million, we get billion.

This is known as the long scale , which was used in the United Kingdom until they followed the United States in by officially adopting the short scale , a system born in France in the seventeenth century and popular in the French-speaking world until midway through the nineteenth century. The short scale uses the same names billion , trillion , quadrillion , etc.

The differences between the long scale and the short scale are summarized in this table:. People often wonder if there is a correct or best way to abbreviate million and billion when writing about figures.

The most commonly seen short forms for thousand , million , billion and trillion in North America and the United Kingdom, respectively, are outlined in the table below. Notice that M appears twice in the table above, to represent both thousand and million.

Some especially older finance texts use M for thousand and MM for million , which can be a source of confusion as M is now widely used to denote million in North America. Of the style guides that address spacing in this context, most AP Stylebook , Chicago Manual of Style , Canadian Style , The Economist Style Guide say to leave no space bn , for example , although it is also common in books and newspaper articles to see the abbreviation preceded by a space.

Since there is no universally accepted way of abbreviating these words, the best practice is to be consistent with whatever system of short forms you choose and to ensure that the meanings of your chosen short forms are clear to your audience—for example by establishing at some point in the text that M stands for million , and so forth.

If you stacked one million pennies on top of each other, the tower would be about a mile high. One billion is one thousand millions. If you stacked one billion pennies on top of each other, the tower would be about miles high.

One trillion is one thousand billions. If you stacked one trillion pennies on top of each other, the tower would be about , miles high … which means it would reach to the moon and back and back to the moon again. Want to brush up on any of your math topics ahead of the ACT?

Check out our individual math guides to get the walk-through on each and every topic on the ACT Math test. Running out of time on the ACT Math section?

Our guide will help you learn how to beat the clock and maximize your ACT Math score. Running out of time on the SAT Math section? It was first coined by Jehan Adam in as by-million and then rendered as byllion by Nicolas Chuquet in The magnitude of difference between billion and million can be illustrated with this example of the time scale:. The video further compares the three numbers. Share this comparison:. If you read this far, you should follow us:.