Have you ever been confused about numbers? Do you also take time to think that 10 million is how many lakhs or how many crores? But you would rarely get confused between billion or billion because one billion and one billion are the same. Where thousand, million, billion are used in American calculations. In India, numbers like thousand lakh, crore and billion are used. But do you know that at one time in Britain, billion did not have the same meaning as it does today? And this is not from centuries ago, but 50-60 years ago.
If we talk about English, there used to be a difference in one matter between UK and America and yes, we are talking about billions of words. Today, including both countries, one billion means one thousand million, but there was a time when it was not so.
Until the 1970s, billion used to mean million in the UK. That is, if we look at it today, we would say that in the 70s, the value of one billion was the number which would be called a trillion today. According to the Statistical Literacy Guide, “in UK official statistics today the term refers to one thousand million.”
This gap in the word billion was closed about 50 years ago. (Symbolic photo: Canva)
But historically in the UK, one billion meant one million million i.e. 1,000,000,000,000. But in America this word used to mean only one thousand million. Later, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson explained that billion means one thousand million and said that now considering the international usage, it means the same.
The interesting thing in this is that the calculation system was not developed anywhere in the UK and US. In fact, both counting systems were made in France. Whereas the system of thousand, lakh, crore, billion is of Indian calculation system. Many historians claim that this large calculation system reached Europe from India via Arabia. But later, two systems of calculation were created in France, one of which was adopted in the UK and the other in America. But now the same system operates at the international level as operates in America.
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Tags: Bizarre news, OMG News, Weird news
FIRST PUBLISHED: March 8, 2024, 16:39 IST
