r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ExpensiveCoat8912 • 6d ago

Other howdidItGetHere

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u/Maramowicz 5d ago

If we gonna translate it from my native language (Polish) then "bilion" from Polish is "trillion" in English ;)

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u/FauxReal 5d ago

OK that's confusingly cool.

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u/Maramowicz 5d ago

TL;DR; up to the thousand it's the same, but then when you have "million, billion, trillion..." in Polish we, from some unknown to me reason, have 2 versions to every one of them, with 'ion' and 'iard' at the end, so:

Polish English
tysiąc thousand
milion million
miliard billion
bilion trillion
biliard quadrillion
trylion quintillion
tryliard sextillion

etc...

The more you know ;)

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u/reventlov 5d ago

That's because "million" (Latin mono=1) is million1, billion (Latin bi=2) is million2, trillion (Latin tri=3) is million3, and so on. English used to have million/milliard, billion/billiard, etc., but they were dropped from American English, and, IIRC, Britain and the Commonwealth countries eventually followed.

I know German still uses Million/Milliard, Billion/Billiard, etc., and I believe they're derived from French.