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billion

 [bil-yuhn]   Origin

bil·lion

   [bil-yuhn] noun, plural -lions, (as after a numeral) -lion, adjective
noun
1.
a cardinal number represented in the U.S. by 1 followed by 9 zeros, and in Great Britain by 1 followed by 12 zeros.
2.
a very large number: I've told you so billions of times.
adjective
3.
equal in number to a billion.

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Billion is always a great word to know.
So is flibbertigibbet. Does it mean:
a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.
a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.
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Origin:
1680–90; < French, equivalent to b(i)- bi-1 + -illion, as in million

Related forms
bil·lionth, adjective, noun
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Collins
World English Dictionary
billion (ˈbɪljən)
 
—n , pl -lions, -lion
1.  one thousand million: it is written as 1 000 000 000 or 109
2.  (formerly, in Britain) one million million: it is written as 1 000 000 000 000 or 1012
3.  (often plural) any exceptionally large number
 
—determiner
4.  (preceded by a or a cardinal number)
 a.  amounting to a billion: it seems like a billion years ago
 b.  (as pronoun): we have a billion here
 
[C17: from French, from bi-1 + -llion as in million]
 
'billionth
 
—adj, —n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline
Word Origin & History

billion
1680s, from Fr. billion (originally byllion in Chuquet's unpublished "Le Triparty en la Science des Nombres", 1484; copied by De la Roche, 1520), from bi- "two" + (m)illion. A million million in Britain and Germany (numeration by groups of sixes), which was the original sense; subsequently altered in
EXPAND
Fr. to "a thousand million" (numeration by groups of threes) and picked up in that form in U.S., "due in part to French influence after the Revolutionary War." France then reverted to the original meaning in 1948. British usage is truer to the etymology, but U.S. sense is increasingly common there in technical writing.
COLLAPSE
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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