Million, billion, trillion: feeling the difference

The seconds test

A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years, which is longer than the time since the last ice age peaked.

Same word ending, a factor of a thousand each time. If a million is a long holiday, a billion is a career, and a trillion is all of recorded history several times over.

The money test

Spend 1,000 dollars a day. A million lasts less than three years. A billion lasts about 2,700 years: you would have had to start in the time of Homer. A trillion lasts 2.7 million years.

The distance test

A million millimeters is one kilometer, a short walk. A billion millimeters is 1,000 kilometers, roughly Paris to Berlin. A trillion millimeters is a million kilometers, more than twice the distance to the Moon.

Beware of translations

English uses the short scale: a billion is a thousand million, or 10 to the power 9. French, Spanish, German and many other languages use the long scale, where the equivalent word means a million million, 10 to the power 12. The French for the English billion is milliard, and the Spanish is mil millones. Translated news stories get this wrong regularly, by a factor of a thousand.

Why it matters

Budgets, company valuations, populations and data volumes all live in this range. Someone who feels the gap between a million and a billion reads the news differently. That feeling is what Magnitudle trains, one question a day.