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kMy

I hate the word ‘billion’. It simply doesn’t sound big enough.

Hence:

The illion

(A beast unknown to Hilaire Belloc)

The illion is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy number,

Which causes very many clever people just to slumber,

It comprises treble zeroes by the score.

But the Million that’s a thousand thou’ we never should confound,

In spite of a deceptive similarity of sound,

With the Billion that is times a thousand more.

For the former is a number recommended as the best,

While the latter is a menace that should rightly be suppressed;

It battens on a woeful superstition in the West,

That zeroes are no more than just a bore.

[The original, Belloc’s ‘the Llama’, is on the Internet.]

Alternatively:

The Earth is believed to be about 4½ billion years old.

“That doesn’t sound much. I thought it was a lot older than that!”

The Earth is believed to be about 4½ thousand million years old.

“Heavens, is it really as old as all that?”

I’m not being rude. I kept making exactly this mistake, and it was this that eventually started me on my present project.

I always try to use ‘thousand million’ instead – or ‘kMy’ for short.