On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> Also, from looking in my dictionaries (both a 30 year old Webster's 
> Dictionary and the Webster's on-line dictionary), "Billion" came from 
> French. In French it is a thousand millions, which matches the American 
> English usage. So who then is historically correct? ;-)

That's only partly true.  I believe that both original and modern French
use billion == million million, but that there was an intermediate
period (a few hundred years) during which the French used billion ==
thousand million.

See http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/large.html.

--apb (Alan Barrett)