[pilaf]

Spanish uses the long scale, but lately I've been noticing people mistakenly using the short scale in Spanish more and more, likely due to the influence of English and the internet, sometimes even in news articles and other "professional" publications. You may see someone speaking of "un trillón de dólares" (a trillion dollars), which while it makes sense in English when speaking of federal budgets or the market cap of FAANG, in long scale that's more than the world's entire money supply.

It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.

[mattigames]

It's only "mistakenly" until it becomes the norm, which as another Spanish speaking person, I bet that will be the case no long in the future.

[Aardwolf]

In Dutch the word "miljard" for 10^9 is too well known and deeply ingrained to change I think, but with "triljoen" which could either mean 10^18 or a direct conversion from the American English trillion, all bets are off

[pilaf]

Yeah, I too think that's likely the direction we're heading, and I'd be fine with either option as long as it was consistently used, this transitional phase is just painful.

[mattigames]

In the meanwhile you can say one thousand millions (for what Americans call a billion), like the local tv news does, and for the bigger one say just say millions of millions (what Americans call a trillion), that should be unambiguous enough.

[theamk]

If you want to be unambiguously understood, especially in international context, it seems it's better to avoid words beyond "million" altogether.

"million of millions of dollars" or "ten to the twelfth dollars" or "one tera dollar" or even "one EEE twelve" (for programmers) will always be understood correctly, no matter which part of world listeners are from.

[qsort]

The only everyday context where numbers on that scale are commonly used is money/finance, and it's pretty universal in that context that 1e9=B=billion, 1e12=T=trillion. This long scale/short scale distinction gets posted a lot but it's one of those cases where in practice it seems to matter very little.

In science and engineering you'd rather use scientific notation anyway, and in math and CS notoriously only 3 numbers exist: 0, 1 and n.

[semanticc]

You don't seem to get the point. That is only universal in current day English. In e.g. Finnish: miljoona = 1e6, miljardi = 1e9, biljoona = 1e12, triljoona = 1e18.