In rec.arts.sf.science Tue Sorensen wrote:
wrote:
Ba is allegedly 47 Jupiter masses and 1,3 milliards of years old.
Is "milliard" a generally accepted English term for "billion" now?
That would be interesting - I'm from Denmark, and in Danish the word
for "billion" is in fact "milliard"...
French, too.
I'm guessing this might be used because "billion" is ambiguous. It is
generally accepted as meaning 1e9, but my understanding is that in the
not-too-distant past in the UK, it meant 1e12. Hence why you often see the
term "thousand million" in texts which need to be exact, and presumably
why a completely unfamiliar but less ambiguous word might possibly be
preferable.
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software