The Hindu Business Line : Billion could be confusing

Since our unit of measure is now billion and more of the same, we better come to terms with the same before shaking hands with those in the billionaire club.

A couple of months back, Infosys crossed the billion-dollar threshold, and within days Wipro too hit the headlines as a $1-billion giant. Almost a year before that, when the TCS had crossed that mark, it did not enjoy such quick company. The day's news, however, belongs to ONGC because it is targeting to become a $50 billion company in five years. Since our unit of measure is now billion and more of the same, we better come to terms with the same before shaking hands with those in the billionaire club.

Put simply, a billion is one followed by nine zeroes. It is one thousand million, but dictionaries give a second meaning too: That a billion, as per a dated British usage, is ``one million million", that is, 1 followed by a dozen zeroes. For the Americans, that is a trillion, the unit they reserve for measuring budget deficits. If that is getting heady already, you can use billion, so that the word doesn't go waste, to mean an extremely large but unspecified number of people or things — such as, a boss shouting at his deputy: "I have told you billions of times how to account for my wife's purchases."

Wikipedia is not too enthusiastic about the word. "It is preferable to avoid the term altogether," it advises because of the confusion in calling a trillion a billion in "French, Norwegian, Dutch (biljoen), German (billion), Spanish (billon), Italian (bilione) and Swedish (billion or biljon)."

For them, milliard equals our billion. Indian number names include the oft-used crore, which is only ten million, and if you are talking of billions of dollars in crores of rupees, you need quite a lot of crores to make up.

An interesting citation from 1926, H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage notes the discrepancy in meaning and observes: "Since billion in our sense is useless except to astronomers, it is a pity that we do not conform." It was only about three decades ago that Harold Wilson, the British PM, announced to the House of Commons that the meaning of `billion' in papers concerning government statistics would thenceforth be 10{+9}, in conformity with US usage.

Yet, Ken Moore writes in alt-usage-english.org: "The US meaning is still rare outside journalism and finance, its introduction having served merely to create confusion." A billion with a second `i' would be billon, which is not just a billion minus a few dollars but an alloy used for coins; it consists of a small amount of silver or gold mixed with a base metal such as copper.

"Oh, I do not blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too," is a Lichty and Wagner quote that billionaires may remember responsibly. "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money," is credited to Senator Everett Dirksen and you find this quote right on top of www.crunchweb.net/87billion where there is an interesting visualisation of $ 87 billion that Mr George Bush wanted in September 2003, to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Three thousand dollars are roughly the thickness of a ream of paper, 2 inches thick or 500 sheets. If you made a single stack, it would be a foot high." Thus, "Nine million dollars would be a pile 5 feet tall, 10 feet long, and 6¼ feet wide. A single stack of dollar bills in this amount would be 3,000 feet high." What if we spread the $87 billion over an American football field? "We would not be able to see much of the game. The players would be buried in 55 feet of money."

The author of the site then adds up the $ 79 billion that Bush has already spent and imagines how it would be if he stacked the whole of $ 166 billion dollar-bills in a single column: "It would be 55,333,200 feet tall, or almost 10,500 miles, or 1.68 times the distance between Washington DC and Baghdad, Iraq."

In comparison, it is said that if you laid Mr Bill Gates's money down end to end, you could go to the moon and back seven times.

mail to: ComingToTerms@TheHindu.co.in

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