billion
noun
Did you know?
How much is a billion? It might depend on whom you ask. Billion was borrowed from French in the late 1600s to indicate the number one million raised to the power of two, or a million million—a number represented by a 1 followed by 12 zeros. However, the French later changed their naming conventions so that a billion became a thousand million (a 1 followed by 9 zeros) and a trillion became a thousand thousand million (or a million million, the old billion). The French have since returned to the older system, but it was this new system that was adopted by American English speakers in the 1800s. In Britain, the newer system has seen increasing use since the 1950s, but the older sense is still sometimes used there as well.
Examples of billion in a Sentence
Elijah Winkler, Kansas City Star, 29 Mar. 2026
House Republican lawmakers concluded that Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of billions in widespread fraud in the state’s social service programs, lied about their knowledge of fraud and retaliated against employees who tried to report it.
—Joe Battenfeld, Boston Herald, 28 Mar. 2026
The companies are already spending billions of dollars on artificial intelligence and developing new hardware such as smartglasses.
—Queenie Wong, Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2026
Next, the team developed a special algorithm that could scan billions of particle collisions in real time and pick out the few rare cases where a photon hit a nucleus and produced a D0 meson.
—Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 28 Mar. 2026
See All Example Sentences for billion
Cite this Entry
“Billion.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/billion. Accessed 30 Mar. 2026.
Copy Citation
