billion

num

1. (US)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.”

   “However, despite the prospect of HS2 being curtailed and the revelation that the programme is late and billions over budget, for now, at least, work on the scheme appears to be business as usual”

   “Micron said in a statement that it would bring extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology to Japan, becoming the first semiconductor company to do so, and expected to invest up to 500 billion yen ($3.6 billion) with support from the Japanese government.”

   “The ChatGPT service which serves as Web front-end to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 was the fastest-growing service in history to break the 100 million user milestone in January and had 1 billion visits by February 2023.”

2. (dated)Either 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. (colloquial, excessive)An unspecified very large number.

   “Near-synonyms: gazillion; see also Thesaurus:zillion”

   “There were billions of people at the concert.”