billion

1. Either of two large amounts:Examples: "At the last assessment it [the national debt] amounts to seven billion pounds (£7,000,000,000)."; "In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result."; "However, despite the prospect of HS2 being curtailed and the revelation that the programme is late and billions over budget, for now, at least, work on the scheme appears to be business as usual"Synonyms: milliard, thousand millionUS

2. Either of two large amounts:Examples: "n = 1,000,000,000,000, that is, = a billion, or the square of a million"; "There is a bill to be picked up for cleaning the former Soviet countries of £1 billion. By that I mean a British billion, because when I was little I was told that a billion was a million million and then the Americans said that it was a thousand million. Well, I am talking about a million million pounds worth of clean-up to be done."Synonyms: trillion[short scale]]>dated

3. (colloquial, hyperbolic) An unspecified very large number.Examples: "Near-synonyms: gazillion; see also Thesaurus:zillion"; "There were billions of people at the concert."colloquialexcessive