Number to words
Spell a number out in words — from the digits you typed, not from a number that has already been rounded. Nothing you type here leaves your browser. It is worked out on your own device, so there is nothing to send and nothing to log — which matters more for text than for most things, because people paste in work they are not supposed to paste anywhere.
A billion changed meaning, and there is a date on it
A British billion used to be a million million. It is a thousand million now, and the change has a day and a Hansard column, because it happened in an answer to a written question.
Robin Maxwell-Hyslop MP asked the Prime Minister to make sure ministers used billion only in its British sense. Harold Wilson's reply opened with the word No:
“No. The word ‘billion’ is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it would be confusing if British Ministers were to use it in any other sense. I accept that it could still be interpreted in this country as 1 million million and I shall ask my colleagues to ensure that, if they do use it, there should be no ambiguity as to its meaning.”
HC Deb 20 December 1974 vol 883 cc711–2W
So it was not a standards body or a dictionary. It was the government declining to defend the older meaning, and asking ministers to be clear when they used the word at all.
Which is why the older reading is shown here. If you are reading a British document written before 1975 and it says billion, it may mean a thousand times more than you think. Nothing in the digits will tell you.
The “and” is the British bit
101 is one hundred and one here and one hundred one in American usage. The difference only shows when something follows the hundreds, so 100, 200 and 4,000 read identically and this page says so rather than inventing a distinction.
It survives an empty group, too: 1,005 is one thousand and five, with the “and” standing in for the hundreds that are not there.
Spelled from the digits, not from the number
Type twenty digits into most converters and the answer is wrong from about the sixteenth. Not because spelling is hard, but because the text was turned into a number before anything spelled it, and a JavaScript number carries roughly fifteen significant digits.
12345678901234567890 becomes
12345678901234567000 the moment it is read as a number.
The words that follow are then a perfect rendering of the wrong
value. This page works on the characters you typed, so the last
digit survives — and it tells you when the other way round
would have differed.
Where this comes from
The quotation is Hansard, the official report of Parliament. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.