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These don't have a standardised size, they are just indicating an enormous number. A trillion is a million million, or 1,000,000,000,000.Ĭhildren often invent words for 'really big numbers'. A billion is a thousand million or 1,000,000,000.
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The British used to use a billion to mean a million million and a trillion to mean a million million million but now they use these words in the same way as the Americans. Special words for numbers of people Group of musiciansīritish English and American English used to have different meanings for 'billion' and 'trillion'. It is difficult to bake bread to a particular weight, so when a person ordered a dozen the thirteenth loaf was added to make sure it was not underweight. Mediaeval times and had to be a certain weight. The reason was to prevent being prosecuted for short weight.
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The baker's dozen was so-called because a baker used to give an extra roll if you asked for a dozen. So you can see that twelve (or a dozen) and twenty (or a score) were important numbers. Before 1971, even the British money was different, and there were twelve old pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound. Every British school child used to know that there were twelve inches in a foot. But in Imperial Measures, many other numbers were important. In metric measurement, the most important number is ten. Incidentally, the irrational fear of the number 13 is Triskaidekaphobia which comes from the Greek tris (three) + kai (and) + deka (ten). There is more than one prefix for each number as they come from different languages (usually Latin or Greek), or they are spelled different ways in different words. For example, a hemisphere is half a sphere. There are prefixes which describe numbers. For example, you don't say two thousand, zero hundreds, zero tens and two.Ī prefix is part of a word, at the front. There is a word for zero, but you don't use it inside a number. But you need the word thousand to tell you how big the first two is. You might think it was positional, as the same numbers get used no matter how large the number is. If this was a number system, then it wouldn't be unary or positional. Cheques are written using words as well as numbers. However, if we write numbers, we usually use the symbols instead. Even then, we use the words for the digits. We use these words when we talk of numbers, unless we are describing a long number, like a telephone number. Enter a number to see what the words are, or click on Count numbers. We learn these words as children, or even babies, long before we meet our 1,2,3. But numbers can be described as words as well. When learning about numbers, it's easy just to think about the number symbols.