Crossword clues for billion
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Milliard \Mil`liard"\ (F. m[-e]l`y[.a]r"; E. m[i^]l"l[i^]*[aum]rd), n. [F., from mille, mil, thousand, L. mille.] A thousand millions; -- usually called billion in the United States. See Billion.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1680s, from French billion (originally byllion in Chuquet's unpublished "Le Triparty en la Science des Nombres," 1484; copied by De la Roche, 1520); see bi- "two" + million. A million million in Britain and Germany (numeration by groups of sixes), which was the original sense; subsequently altered in French to "a thousand million" (numeration by groups of threes) and picked up in that form in U.S., "due in part to French influence after the Revolutionary War" [David E. Smith, "History of Mathematics," 1925]. France then reverted to the original meaning in 1948. British usage is truer to the etymology, but U.S. sense is said to be increasingly common there in technical writing.\n\nIn Italian arithmetics from the last quarter of the fifteenth century the words bilione or duilione, trilione, quadrilione or quattrilione, quintilione, cinquilione, or quinquilione, sestione or sestilione, settilione, ottilione, noeilione and decilione occur as common abbreviations of due volte millioni, tre volte millione, etc. In other countries these words came into use much later, although one French writer, Nicolas Chuquet, mentions them as early as 1484, in a book not printed until 1881. The Italians had, besides, another system of numeration, proceeding by powers of a thousand. The French, who like other northern peoples, took most if not all their knowledge of modern or Arabic arithmetic from the Italians, early confounded the two systems of Italian numeration, counting in powers of a thousand, but adopting the names which properly belong to powers of a million.\n
Wiktionary
num. (context US modern British & Australian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long%20and%20short%20scales English) A milliard, a thousand million: 1 followed by nine zeros, 109.
WordNet
n. the number that is represented as a one followed by 12 zeros; in the United Kingdom the usage followed in the United States is frequently seen [syn: one million million, 1000000000000]
the number that is represented as a one followed by 9 zeros [syn: one thousand million, 1000000000]
Wikipedia
Billion is a name for a large number. It may refer specifically to:
- 1,000,000,000 (, one thousand million), the short scale definition now normal in both British and American English
- 1,000,000,000,000 (, one million million), the long scale definition used formerly in Britain and currently in certain other languages
Billion may also refer to:
- Billions (TV series), a Showtime series
- Billions (film), a 1920 silent comedy
- Billion (company), a Taiwanese modem manufacturer
- Jack Billion (born 1939), the 2006 Democratic Party candidate for governor of South Dakota
- Mr. Billion, a 1977 film by Jonathan Kaplan
Billion Electric Co. Ltd. ( Taiex: #3027), based in Taiwan, was founded in 1973. Billion is a provider of network equipment and power supply products in the Asia Pacific rim. Since its Communication Division was established in 1992, Billion has been developing network equipment and Internet access devices for home, telecommuters, and SME users.
The BILLION brand was officially launched in 2004.
In the past few years Billion has been developing and offering ADSL/ADSL2+, SHDSL, and VPN Router products for broadband market segments. The product lines include following series:
- Billion ADSL Modem/Router
- Billion Wireless ADSL Router
- Billion 3G / ADSL2+ Router
- Billion Home Networking Router
- Billion VoIP Modem/Router
- Billion VDSL2 Modem/Router
- Billion SHDSL Bridge/Router
- Billion iBusiness Security Appliance (IPSec/SSL)
- Billion ISDN Product
Their range of ADSL modem/ routers were introduced into Australia in 2002. Since then, features have been added including 4 port switches, wireless, VoIP, and VPN termination.
A billion is a number with two distinct definitions:
- 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now generally the meaning in both British and American English.
- 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the long scale. This is one thousand times larger than the short scale billion, and equivalent to the short scale trillion.
American English always uses the short scale definition but British English has employed both versions. Historically, the United Kingdom used the long scale billion but since 1974 official UK statistics have used the short scale. Since the 1950s the short scale has been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism, although the long scale definition still enjoys common usage.
Other countries use the word billion (or words cognate to it) to denote either the long scale or short scale billion. For details, see Long and short scales – Current usage.
Another word for one thousand million is milliard, but this is used much less often in English than billion. Some languages, such as Spanish, French or German, use milliard (or a related word) for the short scale billion, and billion (or a related word) is used for the long scale billion. Thus for the Spanish, French and German billion is a thousand times larger than the modern English billion.
Usage examples of "billion".
But the last food shipment had been saved, the outer system agri automation restarted, and there was enough food for the two billion survivors on Tarelsk.
It was a technology that would be worth uncounted billions to Bootstrap, in some unlikely future in which he made it back home and stayed out of jail.
Each of these spherical computers was linked to its four neighbors, north-east-southwest, by a bundle of flexible pushrods running down a flexible, evacuated buckytube, so that the page as a whole constituted a parallel computer made up of about a billion separate processors.
Every time you take a step, something like two hundred and fifty billion molecules of butyric acid pass through the sole of your shoe.
Breakthroughs in X-ray lithography, using giant particle accelerators called synchrotrons, eventually made possible the imprinting of one billion circuits on a chip, with features as small as one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
But that meteoroid is not just millions but almost a billion years old.
The Arbitration Board had settled on a figure of six billion, and the entire Microbiology Department went on strike pending a meeting with the Director.
There are craters everywhere, overlaid circles of all sizes, some barely visible in a surface gardened by billions of years of micrometeorite impact.
Others were much older, little more than circular scars overlaid by younger basins and worn down, presumably by a billion years of micrometeorite rain.
It would be from this shell that billions of micrometeoroids would form.
He thought of it as an aggregate entity, made of billions of cooperating organisms, each measured on the micrometer scale.
Forty billion bytes of data were sequentially driven out of the Teradyne tester, through an array of woven cables, into the back of the probecard, through the microneedles, and into the F1 chip under test.
It is in no way honored by spending billions of dollars of tax monies to put a piece of painted metal on the moon.
Her world was four and a half billion years old, and she had a vocabulary newly full of strike-slip faults, cactoliths, andesite, and monzonite, and she made tilting slipping shapes with her hands to show us how the mountains came about.
These were the Archaea, that third order of life along with bacteria and eucarya -and in this case, also citizens of the panspermic cloud which four billion years before fell on Mars from space, having flown many light-years from their point of spontaneous generation around an early second-generation star.