h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

it's similar in German too - which is what made me go when I saw it

But Americans will have no idea what the term 'milliard' means. I think your 'billion' is different from ours, too - ours is 1,000,000,000.

It is the same.

EMR, in the old days there were three different names for 1,000,000,000.

billion in France and America
milliard in Germany and Eastern Europe
thousand million in Great Britain and Ireland

In the 1970s people in Great Britain and Ireland started to use the American billion and various Government agencies, newspapers and magazines announced that from now on the billion would be the same as in America. But some people still resist this change.

But we really shouldn't be discussing a small thing like a milliard when there's a much more important thing to talk about - the content of this entry.

h2g2 is an online encyclopedia, not the best-selling sequel to the OED. Just put whatever ordinary people will understand, and let's talk about the rest of the entry.

Hi, seems people are getting befuddled with the term Milliard, perhaps a footnote explaining or showing the equivalent figure at the end of the article may be a solution?

i'll change it to thousand million, but I am not using billion

Whatever term you use, tjm, you're going to have to footnote it for the Americans.

Perhaps you could write out the number instead? 1,000,000,000 or 1 x 10^9.

Ach, damned yankees!

I'd assume even americans can work out how large a thousand million is.

*wonders if I should go off to work on an entry on imaginary numbers to really confuse our young neighbours from accross the pond*

I'm sorry to create problems over such a nit-picky point, but the Guide (and particularly the EG) has to be easily understandable to people from all over the world, despite prevailing UK style. I'm not saying you have to use the American term, but I do think you should be understandable by including 'billion' in a footnote or in brackets, or writing out the number. Just as we often include miles in brackets after a value given in kilometres, or degress Fahrenheit after degrees Celsius.

I only discovered very recently that the US and UK terms for larger numbers differ. An American (or Canadian) who didn't know that might assume that the entry was incorrect.

If I don't know what a word means I look it up. If people can't be bothered surely that's their problem and loss, and shouldn't be a consideration for the entry writer? Most people reading a guide entry will be doing it on a computer and have access to dictionary.com etc.

(BTW, that isn't aimed at Americans, but is written from the point of view of someone who has to dumb-down letters written at work).

Oops, simulpost.

cahnged it, does this suit everybody ?

I think you might want to change that again...

That'll do nicely...

Fair enough

imaginary numbers are what made me give up on maths a-level and sit there doing my Russian homework instead. In a class of 5 it was difficult to hide - so I didn't bother.

But I digress

sorry.

But imaginary numbers are very simple. Don't be put off by the name; they're just as real as real numbers. That is, not real at all.