What is the Difference Between a Million, Billion and Trillion?
We as human beings are terrible with big numbers.
We as human beings are terrible with big numbers. When you start talking about the difference between a million, billion and trillion we simply can’t grasp their true magnitude. Maybe it is because the words just differ by a letter or two. But they are so drastically different in scale. So how different is a million, billion and trillion?
What is the Difference?
A million is a 1 followed by 6 zeroes, a billion is a 1 followed by 9 zeros and a trillion is a 1 followed by 12 zeroes. One way to compare them is to write out the numbers. Writing them out gives you this:
Million — 1,000,000
Billion — 1,000,000,000
Trillion — 1,000,000,000,000
If you are looking just at the number of digits, the billion just has a few more zeroes so it can’t be too much bigger than a million, right? Wrong. In math, one thing you can do to compare numbers is to drop the same number of zeroes from them.
Now writing all numbers with 6 zeroes dropped so we get this:
Million — 1
Billion — 1,000
