A billion is a number with two distinct definitions:
1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 109 (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both British and American English.
1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (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. This is the historical meaning in English and the current use in many non-English-speaking countries where billion and trillion 1018 (ten to the eighteenth power) maintain their long scale definitions.American English adopted the short scale definition from the French (it enjoyed usage in France at the time, alongside the long-scale definition). The United Kingdom used the long scale billion until 1974, when the government officially switched to the short scale, but since the 1950s the short scale had already been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism; the long scale definition still enjoys some limited usage in the UK.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.)
Milliard, another term for one thousand million, is still found occasionally in English, and is very common in most other European languages. For example, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew (Asia), Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Persian, Turkish and Ukrainian — use milliard (or a related word) for the short scale billion, and billion (or a related word) for the long scale billion. Thus for these languages billion is thousand times larger than the modern English billion. However, in Russian, while milliard (миллиард) is used for the short scale billion, trillion (триллион) is used for the long scale billion.
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