[andreareina]

I still mourn the long scale. A billion is obviously a million millions.

[SushiHippie]

Thanks! In germany we use the long scale, and this is the first time it clicks.

"Eine Billion" is Million² bi -> 2 "Eine Billiarde" is 1000 * Million² "Eine Trillion" is million³ tri -> 3 "Eine Trilliarde" is 1000 * Million³ And so on

Yes I knew what a million, milliard, billion, billiarde and so on are, but it never made click that the long scale makes so much sense.

[lotsofpulp]

I feel like at that point, I would rather just use scientific notation (10^x).

I also like the easy suffix for thousand (k), million (M), billion (B), trillion (T), quadrillion (Q) for written conversation. $10B revenue, 5k liters, 300M people, etc.

[eru]

Your 'suffixes' are a hodge-podge. Might as well stick with SI prefixes (like you are doing with the 'k' already?)

[lotsofpulp]

It isn’t consistent, but a lot more people can fluently read “B” for billion rather than “G” giga and understand 10^9. The SI prefix “k” is sufficiently used that it is understood.

[s1artibartfast]

It is less intuitive for me as an outsider that a trillion would be a million million millions instead of a billion billions

[eru]

Maybe, but either way is relatively quickly to learn by rote for the few orders of magnitude that come up in 'daily life'.

For anything bigger, you'd use 'scientific' notation anyway.

[Dylan16807]

You can make an argument for that, but neither system does that so it's not very relevant to the choice.

I think an exponential system would do better to have a different naming scheme.

[eru]

Yes, and something like scientific notation is used fairly often even in lay contexts.

Eg it's common to read sentences like the following in popular science texts: 'ACME produces one quintillion widgets per year, that's a one followed eighteen zeroes.' The second half is basically scientific notation, but written out.