Talk:Milliard

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Have never encountered the phrase 'Milliard' in the UK.

'billion' used to refer to a million million in the UK, but the US meaning of a thousand million has displaced that.

Probably should be mentioned in the article then. I've only ever encountered "milliard" in works dating from the 1930s, it might well be an extinct word by now. - Hephaestos 00:30, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I have heard it a few times - not frequently, but on a fairly regular basis. It certainly seems to be on its way out though, and the American use "billion" is definitely becoming more common (sadly - it's far harder to work out the size of numbers... million² = "Bi(-mi)llion; million³ = "Tri(mi)llion"; etc). Grutness

See my post on Talk:Billion where I give examples of use dated 2001 and more recently. There are government documents using the word back in the 1960s, also I believe SI units specfied it back in the 1970s. -Wikibob | Talk 23:47, 2004 Nov 21 (UTC)

This was a single usage by a South African pastor back in 2001. The Australian usage you mentioned was recanted. Please give links / refs to your beliefs of SI usage, etc. Otherwise, it does indeed look very much like an obsolete word. Ian Cairns 01:15, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Text altered slightly to reflect the changes that have been made at billion. [[User:Grutness|Grutness ^talk ]] 13:32, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal to move to Wiktionary

Why the term "milliard", but not the term "billion" ???

[edit] Very important: make the difference between!

You mention the importance to differ between long scale and short scale measuring. In the whole "old world" a billion is not a billion. We (german, french, italian... speaking countries ) called a us-billion not billion but "milliard" our billion is 1000 times a us-billion. Do you see clear? No? As you can see, millions of peoples are confusing every day by reading newspaper articles they have been directly translated from us or gb-english into our languages because of interpreters don't know this mature difference...

So why not to make clearly the difference?

The world does not know only english, english is a minor language (one of thousends) - even but the most popular foreign language.

cosy from switzerland - a 4-language country (GER,FR,IT,Rumantsch) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.62.86.88 (talk) 09:34, 30 December 2006 (UTC).

The UK and Ireland are part of the 'old world' yet nowadays use the short-scale billion - so your "whole" comment is not entirely correct. The explanation is covered in full at - Long and short scales, which is linked from this article. Note that some short-scale countries still use milliard and presumably go straight to trillion? eg Denmark. Ian Cairns 10:13, 30 December 2006 (UTC)