Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
The entry titled "A billion reasons to complain."
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Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2008 > February > 28 > Entry
A billion reasons to complain
I try not to use this blog to advance personal agendas too much (OK, I may have kvetched here once or twice about my lousy cell phone service), but I have been moved to make a public request to the nation of Mexican: please embrace the word and concept of billion.
I never knew just how handy this little word was until I moved to a country where it doesn’t exist. Here in Mexico, and lots of other places in Latin America, the number 1,000,000,000 isn’t one billion, it’s thousand million. As in, “China has one thousand three million people” and “the universe is 13 thousand million years old.”
The lack of the billion term becomes most glaring in Mexican news stories filled with facts and figures. Yesterday’s La Jornada newspaper tackles the tricky subject of taxes paid by Mexico’s nationalized oil company Pemex. We learn that Pemex sold a record level of oil totalling “42 thousand 886 million dollars.” And the trade imbalance in petroleum “fell from 19 thousand million dollars in 2006 to 17 thousand 200 million dollars in 2007.” Got that?
So why the lack of a billion in the Mexican vernacular?
The wikipedia entry on billon, Spanish for billion, gives a glimpse. Apparently in Spanish, billion actually means 10 to the 12th power, or 1,000,000,000,000 (our trillion), a definition dating back to the 15th century. The entry notes that the discrepancy often leads to translation problems from English to Spanish and vice-versa. One of the worst is the use of the term billonario in Spanish, since no one (not even Carlos Slim) has amassed a fortune of one trillion dollars.
It seems that the correct Spanish term for 1,000,000,000 is not a billion but the rarely glimpsed millardo. This word was introduced by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1995, according to yet another wikipedia entry, to “stop the American word billion from being translated to billon and contaminating the current number system in Latin America.”
Millardo, though, hasn’t caught on in Mexico, and as a result there is no nifty, concise word to describe thousand million. Hopefully, it won’t take a millardo to figure this one out.
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By Frank
February 28, 2008 8:19 AM | Link to this
What you’re referring to is the difference between Short Scale (billion) and Long Scale (thousand million). It hasn’t been that long ago since these were also referred to as American and British, respectively. The British government switched to Short Scale in 1974, but Long Scale used to be prevalent (any reader of Agatha Christie mysteries can tell you this…).
Millardo is not a word that the worthies at the Academia Real created out of whole cloth. It is the Spanish translation of a word first proposed in the 16th century by a French mathematician.
Most non-English-speaking countries in Europe and the Americas use the Long Scale, so your wait may be long.