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billion

billion

1.0
One thousand million written 1,000,000,000
  • numeral
  • /ˈbɪljən/
translation icon : mil millones
  • Over $1 billion a year!
  • one billion
  • one billion dollars
  • about one billion

So how big would a stack of a billion dollar bills be?

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Examples

  • And my students and clients have done over a billion dollars in sales.

  • We have over a billion dollars walking in and out of these offices looking for love.

  • So we have gone from a zero to a billion in just six years.

  • And it can be yours for a billion dollars.

  • This dress must have been seen several billion times around the world.

  • If you wanna make a billion dollars, that is the secret.

  • I mean, there was half a billion dollars worth of funding on the line.

  • We spend $250 billion a year on defense.

  • Today, the government of the United States borrows $2 billion every 11 hours.

    Academic text (2011)
  • The new technology company is valued at over one billion dollars.

Synonyms

one thousand million
vsbillion
  • UK
1.0

A number equal to 1,000,000,000 written as one followed by nine zeros

has the same numeric value but uses a different word form

Compounds

A measure of how many billion math calculations a computer does each second

A rough annual grass grown for edible seeds, animal feed, and wildlife food

How Many

trillion
346 2.6
billion
1.0
million
1.0
thousand
1.0

Surface Forms

billion cardinal word
1,000,000,000 cardinal digit
1 billion cardinal word

Etymology

Billion comes from the parts bi- 'two' and million, so it was made as the next step after a million. Today most English speakers use billion to mean 'one thousand million', 1,000,000,000, so think of it as the big number after million.