喜樂美語

You can picture billion as a single, very tall stack of zeros standing for one specific number — in today's English, 1,000,000,000 (a thousand million). The word is built from 'bi-' (two) on top of 'million', and that 'two' is exactly why the number is slippery: historically it meant 'the second power' of a million. From that one fixed number two side-doors open — one where the huge size, not the exact count, is what matters ('billions of stars'), and one old British room where the same word pointed at a much bigger number.

可以把 billion 想成一疊很高的零，代表一個確定的數字——在現代英文裡就是 1,000,000,000（十億，也就是一千個百萬）。這個字是 bi-（二）加在 million（百萬）上面，而那個「二」正是它會讓人搞混的原因：在歷史上它本來指「百萬的第二次方」。從這個固定的數字長出兩道側門——一道是重點不在精確數字、而在「多到嚇人」（billions of stars，數十億顆星），另一道則是舊式英式英文裡，同一個字指著一個大得多的數。

From the word’s history

From French 'billion' (1680s), coined as 'bi-' (two) + 'million' to mean 'the second power of a million' (a million million). French later re-cut it into groups of three to mean 'a thousand million', and the US adopted that value; Britain long kept the older 'million million'. This split is exactly why senses 1 and 3 disagree on the number.

源自法文 billion（1680年代），由 bi-（二）＋ million（百萬）造出，本義是「百萬的第二次方」（即百萬乘百萬）。後來法文改以每三位一組來切，變成「一千個百萬」，美國採用了這個值；英國則長期保留較舊的「百萬乘百萬」。義項一和義項三在數字上對不上，正是這段分裂留下的痕跡。

etymonline.com/word/billion

登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。

billions

意思相近

thousand millioncountlessmillion millionloadstrilliontonsmillionsheaps

意思相反

nonea couple

原始詞典資料3 筆記錄

以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。

billionnum/ˈbɪljən/

  • 1

    Either of two large amounts:

    • At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds (£7,000,000,000).
    • In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result.
  • 2

    datedEither of two large amounts:

    • n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million
    • There is a bill to be picked up for cleaning the former Soviet countries of £1 billion. By that I mean a British billion, because when I was little I was told that a billion was a million million and then the Americans said that it was a thousand million. Well, I am talking about a million million pounds worth of clean-up to be done.
  • 3

    An unspecified very large number.

    • Near-synonyms: gazillion; see also Thesaurus:zillion
    • There were billions of people at the concert.

摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。