2011-10-29 10:09:21
The eurozone's bailout fund now stands at one trillion euros ( 880bn or $1.4tn)
after a deal was thrashed out in Brussels by European leaders. The figure of
one trillion has become increasingly widely used but do we really understand
it?
Once a representation of something beyond our comprehension, the word trillion
- 1,000,000,000,000 - has now sealed its place in common parlance.
As US politicians were trying to find budget savings of $1.2tn, European
leaders were topping up their rescue fund to the tune of 1tn euros.
A combination of economic progress and inflation means larger and larger
numbers are needed to define financial sums, and a billion is no longer the
benchmark. So how did trillion take over?
The words billion and trillion, or variations on them, were first documented by
French mathematicians in the 15th Century.
A trillion was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, or the third power of a million. The
US later adopted what became known as the short scale, which reduced a trillion
to 1,000,000,000,000 (and a billion to 1,000,000,000), but the British retained
the old system until the 1970s.
How billions and trillions changed
image of Susie Dent Susie Dent Lexicographer
In 1690, the philosopher John Locke suggested the French word billion as a
useful term for avoiding "the often repeating of millions of millions of
millions etc". The French had purposely coined "billion" a 100 or so years
earlier to denote the second power of a million ("bi" being the standard prefix
for two).
However the application of the word was subsequently changed by French
arithmeticians, so that the terms "billion" and "trillion" denoted not the
second and third powers of a million, but a thousand millions and a thousand
thousand millions. This system was adopted by the US. Britain, however,
retained the original (and etymologically correct) use.
In 1974, Harold Wilson pledged that the British government would adopt the
"short scale" naming system used in the US to avoid ambiguity. As a result, the
value of billion is now generally understood to mean a thousand millions.
Nonetheless this is still a bone of contention for many, and the older sense "a
million millions" is still common.
At that point, the word trillion was rarely mentioned in the news and resided
more in the imagination of children, alongside zillions and gazillions, as an
expression of something on an enormous scale.
It was more commonly used in the US. The New York Times, for instance,
anticipated the US economy in 1970 would soon surpass $1tn. But it only cropped
up in the British media with regularity in the 1980s, in reference to the yen
or the lira.
But the last few years has seen its increasing use and it has now supplanted a
billion, says James Abdey, a fellow of statistics at London School of
Economics.
"When it was first used in the 1970s it had shock value. The first time someone
hears the word trillion, they might not know the number of zeros but they know
it's a big number. But the figures are now bandied around in the media and it's
devalued its importance."
The US is more used to the term, due to the size of its economy and its
spending power.
"'Trillion' does seem to have much more currency than it used to, probably
because of the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the budget and
deficit," says John Allen Paulos a professor of mathematics at Temple
University in Philadelphia.
"This doesn't mean that most people have a visceral grasp of its size. It'd be
interesting to have the presidential candidates asked during a debate, How many
millions in a trillion? I suspect at least some of them would try to deflect
the question with a joke. And emotion trumps the numbers as usual. A few
million dollars spent on some hot-button issue often arouses more ire than a
trillion-dollar war."
The big numbers divide
Short scale: US, UK, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Ireland, English Canada
and others
Long scale: France, Italy (both switched to short then back to long), Spain,
Germany, French Canada and others
It's not only in the more affluent countries that the word has risen to
prominence. Living in Zimbabwe during the height of its inflation problems in
2008, people became used to talking about their daily expenses in terms of
trillions.
Elsewhere, economic growth has driven an inexorable rise in numbers, says
economist Andrew Dilnot. "The speed of change you get from quite small annual
growth is what catches us all out. If something is growing at 10% a year then
it doubles every seven-and-a-quarter years."
But increased use has not enhanced understanding, he says. "My guess is that
most people really struggle to have a clear idea of what a trillion is. I have
to sit down and think pretty hard how many noughts there are.
"The answer I think is what we mean is 1,000 billion, which has 12 noughts.
Some people still think a billion is a million-million, which is really a
trillion, and they think a trillion is something else. So the honest answer is
people just see a trillion and think it's a very, very big number."
About 20 years ago, a study suggested Italians were much more comfortable with
big numbers than the British because of the lira, says Mr Dilnot, and despite
the increased use of trillion in British discourse (most commonly about debt),
the UK's national income is described as 1,500bn not 1.5tn, because the UK
understands billions better.
The new trillions
Trillion - 1 + 12 zeros
Quadrillion - 1 + 15 zeros
Quintillion - 1 + 18 zeros
Sextillion - 1 + 21 zeros
Septillion - 1 + 24 zeros
Octillion - 1 + 27 zeros
Nonillion - 1 + 30 zeros
Decillion - 1 + 33 zeros
Numbers in short scale
One way to enhance understanding is to divide a big number by the number of
people affected, he says, so if the population of the eurozone is about 330m,
then a trillion shared represents about 3,000 euros for each person. Another
way is to count the numbers one at a time, one per second. A million seconds is
11 days, a billion seconds is about 32 years and a trillion seconds is 32,000
years.
As well as the mathematical reality that numbers really are getting bigger,
there is also a wilful repetition of words like trillion, says lexicographer
Susie Dent.
"The use of 'trillions' in our general conversation is part of a trend towards
linguistic inflation or 'bigging up'.
"Some words are used to the point of exhaustion and need replacing with others
in order to maintain the strength of expression. So 'heroes' are now
'superheroes', we're not just angry any more, we are 'incandescent with rage',
and 'tragedy' is losing its power because it's used for less than tragic
events.
And words which previously had sufficient power in themselves are attracting
prefixes such as uber- or mega- in order to re-energise them, she adds.
"'Trillion' has become a bit of a throw-away for a large amount."
Next up, quadrillion.