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The long and short scales are two powers of ten number naming systems that are consistent with each other for smaller numbers, but are contradictory for larger numbers. [1] [2] Other numbering systems, particularly in East Asia and South Asia, have large number naming that differs from both the long and short scales.
Two naming scales for large numbers have been used in English and other European languages since the early modern era: the long and short scales. Most English variants use the short scale today, but the long scale remains dominant in many non-English-speaking areas, including continental Europe and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
The following table lists the names of small numbers used in the long and short scales, along with the power of 10, engineering notation, and International System of Units (SI) symbols and prefixes. [1] [page needed] [2] [page needed] [3] [page needed] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original; Scale factor, a number which scales, or multiplies, some quantity; Long and short scales, how powers of ten are named and grouped in large numbers; Scale parameter, a description of the spread or dispersion of a probability distribution
American English adopted the short scale definition from the French (it enjoyed usage in France at the time, alongside the long-scale definition). [4] The United Kingdom used the long scale billion until 1974, when the government officially switched to the short scale, but since the 1950s the short scale had already been increasingly used in ...
However, since 1974, official UK statistics have used the short scale. Since the 1950s, the short scale has been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism, although the long scale definition still has some limited usage. [1] [2] American English has always used the short scale definition. Other countries use the word trillion (or ...
the long scale — designates a system of numeric names formerly used in British English, but now obsolete, in which a billion is used for a million million (and similarly, with trillion, quadrillion etc., the prefix denoting the power of a million); and a thousand million is sometimes called a milliard. This system is still used in several ...
Its definition is based on the average length of a year according to the Julian calendar, which has one leap year every four years. According to the geological science convention, this is used to form larger units of time by the application of SI prefixes to it; at least up to giga-annum or Ga, equal to 1,000,000,000 a (short scale: one billion ...