Trillion

In the long numerical scale traditionally used in Spanish, and in most continental European countries^{[cita requerida]}, one billion equals 10¹², that is, one million million. In the International System of Units it is represented by the prefix “tera”.

The Anglo-Saxon “billion”

In the 17th century, a group of mathematicians adopted the name billion (or its equivalent in other languages) for a thousand million (10⁹ or 1,000,000,000), a number that speakers of other languages called a billion (milliard) (see short numerical scale).

This meaning has been retained in American English, Brazilian Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish, among other languages. Notably, British English took longer to accept the meaning of a billion per billion; however, by the end of World War II it was already entering the European dialect of English, and in 1974, the British government officially declared that it represented the number 10⁹, thus coinciding with it. with the historic American meaning of that word.

It is worth clarifying, then, that the number trillion (in Spanish), to which reference is made in the original entry, is equivalent, in the Anglo-Saxon lexicon, to the number called trillion (in English).

Trillion (10¹²) is equal to trillion (10¹²). Or, trillion is equivalent in numbers to: 1,000,000,000,000, the same as trillion, which is also equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000.

Frequent translation errors

Due to what has been explained, mistakes are often made when translating articles from English to other languages. Even the British themselves may be unaware whether in an old English text billion refers to "a billion" or a "million million", since both uses coexisted until recently. However, over the years - and largely due to the growing American influence - the first has become quite dominant in the United Kingdom, compared to the frank decline of the second, to the point of being considered official in 1974.

A similar error often arises when translating the number trillion. For example, the GDP of the United States, which in English is about sixteen trillion US dollars, corresponds to 16 trillion dollars (and not 16 trillion) in Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish and other languages (although, of course, both denominations refer to exactly the same number, 16·10¹²).

In 1995, at the request of former Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera in his capacity as a member of the Academy, the Royal Spanish Academy decided to create the word "millardo" with the meaning of "billion", similar to the one already existing in French and Italian, in order to try to facilitate the translation of the word billion found in books and works written in American English. However, the term "millardo" is not usually widely used in Latin America, with the exception of Venezuela itself. The Academy has mentioned in the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas that the term "billion" is ambiguous in Puerto Rico, although it should not be so and is considered barbaric, due to its current state of association with the United States Joined.

Billions and “billionaires”

As mentioned above, if billion is translated as "one thousand million", similarly billionaire should be translated as "thousand millionaire", "billionaire", "billionaire" or, less precisely, "billionaire."

In fact, the word "billionaire" is a clear mistranslation.

William Bill Henry Gates III (born 1955), one of the co-founders of the computer company Microsoft Corporation, managed to accumulate, in the late 1990s, a personal fortune of about 90,000 million dollars (that is,, about 0.09 trillion). For his part, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oil magnate John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937) would have assets of the order of 663 billion dollars (0.66 trillion), updated at present values.