Billion meaning

bĭlyən
billions
See word origin
Frequency:
The definition of a billion is a thousand millions.

An example of a billion is $1,000,000,000.

noun
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The cardinal number equal to 109 .
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(chiefly british) The cardinal number equal to 1012 .
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An indefinitely large number.
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A thousand millions (1,000,000,000)
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Trillion (a million millions)
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Amounting to one billion in number.
adjective
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One thousand millions, or 1 followed by nine zeros (10 to the 9th power). In long scale usage, billion refers to a million millions, or 1 followed by 12 zeros (10 to the 12th power). See space/time and long scale.
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(US, modern British & Australian, short scale) A milliard, a thousand million: 1 followed by nine zeros, 109.
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(colloquial, in the plural, hyperbolic) A very large number.

There were billions of people at the concert.

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Origin of billion

  • French a million million blend of bi- second power bi–1 million

    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

  • From French billion

    From Wiktionary

Billion Sentence Examples

  • In 2006, roughly a billion people had access to the Internet.

  • She couldn't fathom the enormity of a billion souls like the one she'd touched.

  • The two assertions are not to be reconciled by pointing out that Professor Tornebohm underestimated, for instance crediting the United States with only 1 1 billion tons, whereas the United States Geological Survey's expert credits that country with from ten to twenty times this quantity; nor by pointing out that only certain parts of Europe and a relatively small part of North America have thus far been carefully explored for iron ore, and that the rest of these two continents and South America, Asia and Africa may reasonably be expected to yield very great stores of iron, and that pyrite, one of the richest and most abundant of ores, has not been included.

  • The approximate value of the world's oyster crop approaches f4,000,000 annually, representing over 30,000,000 bushels, or nearly Io billion oysters.

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