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As for names for large powers of ten, such as the ones you mentioned, are recent and appear to be made up, like zillions, or gazillions, which are more of an idea than an exact number.
I remember my father, who was a Sanskrit scholar, telling me formal names of powers of ten well beyond the hundredth power. There was no practical use for such fantastically large numbers except for ideas expressed in mythology or accepted in cosmological view of the uniberse of Vedic culture.

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I found a link, unfortumately a wikipedia link that gives names for some absurdly large powers of ten.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_large_numbers#section_1

I have to admit that as an American I didn't realize that other countries had a different definition of billions. This has been an enlightening thread. Thanks to all for sharing about this.

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I distinctly remember trying to figure out which billion was being referred to.
I am glad you enjoyed it. Yet there were suggestions such as it belonged on some "math talk forum", or that "numbers are stupid" :D This is hardly math. It's simply something we might not be aware of and might be useful in our travels.

Yeah, I wouldn't like to have my long-scale billion miles treated as short-scale billion miles. :)

And the difference may save you from prison when declaring cash dollars at customs. :D

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All that advice for free. Can'nt beat that.

10-0=1 where I live.

Yes. It's called a decimal point for a reason.

Yes, the reason it's called that in English is that's what is used in English-speaking countries. In other languages it is called the decimal comma.
As someone mentioned above, the most convenient way to write is scientific notation, no real way to get confused over 1.35e9.

Yeah, that's clear as... um... what the heck did you just write? :D

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The confusion between comma and a period still remains.
The problem is use of a full stop, or a comma, instead of a mid-point, or comma to denote the decimal point.
When writing, I never use a full stop for a decimal point.

There's no confusion because only one of the symbols is in use (as opposed to 1,000.34 or 1.000,340 where both symbols are used). While multinational, most people I'm in contact with have an engineering/scientific background so there's no issue. And more importantly, no messing around with billion/trillion/etc.

medic51vrf (if you were serious), 5e3 = 5 * (10^3). Or in the example I gave before, 1.35e9 = 1.35 * (10^9) [or 1,35 * 10^9 if you use a decimal comma]

I wasn't but thanks for the explanation just in case. :)

Gotta be careful with those, since a lot of folks don't understand that computer guys sometimes mean the decimal units everyone else does (10**3/6/9/12... how storage is usually sold) and sometimes mean the binary approximations of those (2**10/20/30/40... how memory is usually sold.)

But "a billion" is much shorter to write than "a thousand million," and besides, there are very few things where anyone needs to scale over 10**12, so running out of terms isn't much of an issue, while being unnecessarily wordy at the short end of the scale is.

The old alternative term for 10**9, a "milliard" is pretty much extinct, which might be a decent compromise otherwise, since it solves the wordiness problem.

Which is itself rather counter-intuitive, since every other common scale has its log10 evenly divisible by 3.

Perhaps the clearest answer is to write everything out as in a check: 12,345.67 (twelve thousand three hundred fourty five and 67/100) :)

Quite right.

You forgot hundred thousand millions.
I can't argue that a thousand million is easier to say than a billion. The main point of this thread was that nomenclature varies. Even with millard, we would still have hundred thousand millions.
While it's true that 10**12 is about the limit of the scale as things stand today. For many of Americans, even 10**6 is meaningless in everyday life. But 10**12 is in no way an absolute limit. Didn't Zimbabwe have a trillion dollar bill? Hyperinflation usually end up changing the currency, bringing down the number of zeroes necessary.

I'd be cautious about making such a claim. There are widely used scales that groups digits by twos. Gogool is made up word, even less counter-intuitive than zillion.

That requires unnecessary use of as many extra symbols as the number of digits in the fractional part or the number. Any symbol can be used, as long as it avoids confusion. I find both practices, using a full stop or comma to use for decimal separator to be odd. A dot, at at height half the height of characters above the baseline works fine.