Billions and billions

This week's column is by Online Editor Mike Pilewski.

We live in a world of numbers. They're on our clocks and calendars, and in our phones and bank accounts. They exist as whole numbers but also as fractions, decimals and percentages, as ratios and sports scores.

Are you comfortable expressing all of them in English? In the October Spotlight, language author Vanessa Clark gives you some practice as she gets you up to speed, taking you from zero to 60, so to speak, through the world of numbers. Actually, being British, she'll take you from nought to 60.

Fortunately, aside from 0, Britons and Americans now use the same words for the same numbers. This wasn't always the case.

The problem was mainly with the word "billion". In America, it's always meant 1,000,000,000 — a thousand million. In Britain, it used to mean the same as in German — a million million. But it no longer does. The American system has been in use throughout the English-speaking world since at least the 1970s.

Of course, such large numbers weren't really needed before that. A "thousand million" was about as big as you had to go.

Nowadays, we live in a world of much grander dimensions. You can impress your friends with numbers like these, which now regularly come up in news reports. Each "-illion" is a thousand times the previous one.

7 billion: the world population next month.

$15 trillion: the US national debt — mostly from the Iraq and Afghan Wars.

$23 quadrillion: the amount by which each of several Americans was accidentally overcharged on his Visa card in 2009.

295 quintillion: the number of bytes (letters or characters) of data stored in the world, according to a 2011 study.

It's common to hear English speakers use words like "zillion", "gazillion" and "bajillion", too, but these aren't real words. They're just an informal way of expressing an unimaginably large quantity: "A zillion people were at the concert."

There is another very large number you've heard of, though. A googol is 10¹⁰⁰ (10 to the 100th power, or a 1 followed by 100 zeroes or noughts). The word was chosen to be the name of a search engine that returned a near-infinite number of results. Someone misspelled it and it became Google.

Thinking of all these large numbers is enough to make us googly-eyed (UK: goggle-eyed). So to get back down to earth and use numbers that count in everyday life, be sure to read Vanessa's article in the October Spotlight!