When was the word trillion invented

At this rate, Bill would likely be in cryonic deep freeze in September , when he'd reach quadrillionairehood. This means Bill could sponsor 4. Of course, only about Bill could employ the entire city - men, women, and children - for three years and four months.

Bill could hire the entire US military establishment for nearly four years. And did you know there are two "billions"? The word "millione" was coined in Italy from mille Latin, "thousand" to mean "great thousand" and this has given us our word "million. Chuquet coined the words billion, trillion,. These arithmeticians used "illion" after the prefixes b, tr, quadr, quint, sext, sept, oct and non to denote the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th powers of a million.

Then around the middle of the 17th century, some other French arithmeticians used the same words instead for the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th powers of a thousand. Although condemned by the greatest lexicographers as "erroneous" Littre and "an entire perversion of the original nomenclature of Chuquet and de la Roche" Murray , this newer usage is now standard in the US, and its use is spreading with the use of computers an industry dominated by the US.

The older logical system survives in Britain but is not now used by the Government, and most of the daily papers Nothing stands still.

The symbol for a million in Ancient Egypt was a pictogram of a man holding up his hands in surprise; and before this century who needed anything bigger than a million?

Numbers and corporations get bigger, and inflation needs larger numbers to express what may well be smaller values Here are some of the number-prefixes recommended by the Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures in Is there a formula for the "-illions"?

It depends on which system you're using, British or American. Not many people realise there are two systems. The US later adopted what became known as the short scale, which reduced a trillion to 1,,,, and a billion to 1,,, , but the British retained the old system until the s.

At that point, the word trillion was rarely mentioned in the news and resided more in the imagination of children, alongside zillions and gazillions, as an expression of something on an enormous scale.

It was more commonly used in the US. But it only cropped up in the British media with regularity in the s, in reference to the yen or the lira. But the last few years has seen its increasing use and it has now supplanted a billion, says James Abdey, a fellow of statistics at London School of Economics. The first time someone hears the word trillion, they might not know the number of zeros but they know it's a big number. But the figures are now bandied around in the media and it's devalued its importance.

The US is more used to the term, due to the size of its economy and its spending power. It'd be interesting to have the presidential candidates asked during a debate, How many millions in a trillion? I suspect at least some of them would try to deflect the question with a joke. And emotion trumps the numbers as usual. A few million dollars spent on some hot-button issue often arouses more ire than a trillion-dollar war.