Billion

[5] Moreover even in 1941, Churchill remarked "For all practical financial purposes a billion represents one thousand millions...".

Milliard, another term for one thousand million, is extremely rare in English, but words similar to it are very common in other European languages.

[7][8] For example, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew (Asia), Hungarian, Italian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (although the expression mil milhões — a thousand million — is far more common), Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish (although the expression mil millones — a thousand million — is far more common), Swedish, Tajik, Turkish, Ukrainian and Uzbek — use milliard, or a related word, for the short scale billion, and billion (or a related word) for the long scale billion.

This new convention was adopted in the United States in the 19th century, but Britain retained the original long scale use.

In 1974, Prime Minister Harold Wilson confirmed that the government would use the word billion only in its short scale meaning (one thousand million).