1,000,000,000
The word billion (abbreviation: billion billion or more rarely ) is the number word for the number 1,000,000,000 = 109 One billion is equal to one billion. The word goes back to French milliard and dates as well as a million ultimately from Latin mille " thousand " from. In contrast to the small number of words written like a hundred and a thousand billion is a noun and is capitalized. Its use in the sense of one billion is in German only since the war indemnity due from France to the German Empire 1870/1871 art.
Resolutions for units
Referring to units, then referred to the billions of times the unit with the prefix giga (abbreviated G ), whereas one billionth of ( 10-9) with nano (abbreviated n ) is called. For example, a nanometer (nm ) is a billionth of a meter (10-9 m).
The name is gigabytes (abbreviated GB) Also in terms of the unit byte in the computer science today understood in the sense of exactly one billion bytes. These are 109 bytes, not 230 = 1,073,741,842 bytes, which exceeds one billion bytes by more than seven percent. To name of 230 bytes, the term gibibyte ( GiB ) is suggested today; Gibi (Gi ) is an Binärpräfix while giga (G ) is a Dezimalpräfix.
The difference to American English
In American English, a billion billion is called (often abbreviated bn). This is to be distinguished from the German trillion, which is 1,000 billion, ( false friend ). The milliard used in British English has been largely displaced by the American billion.