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Billion   Listen
noun
Billion  n.  According to the French and American method of numeration, a thousand millions, or 1,000,000,000; according to the English method, a million millions, or 1,000,000,000,000. See Numeration.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books



... D' Presbyter'an is a heap too gloomy a religion for a niggah, sah. Dey lams loose at me wid foreord'nation an' preedest'nation, an' how d' bad place is paved wid chil'ens skulls, an' how so many is called, an' only one in a billion beats d' gate; an' fin'lly, las' Sunday, B'rer Peters, he's d' preacher, he ups an' p'ints at me in speshul an' says he sees in a dream how I'm b'ar-hung an' breeze-shaken over hell; an', sah, he simply scare ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... forbears in America and elsewhere. Mr Bonar Law, in a recent interview in the Observer, stated that we had sent back to the United States practically the whole of our holdings of American securities to be sold or pledged as collateral for loans, and that the value of them was three billion dollars—L600 millions sterling. Any of them that have only been pledged can presumably be used to meet the loans raised as they fall due, and so will lighten our burden in the matter of repayment. These loans raised ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... replaced candles, lamps, and gas fixtures; and the old cook stove gave way to modern ranges of various sorts. The safer and easier the devices, the more human vigilance relaxed. Today, of our half billion dollar fire loss annually, one-fifth of it occurs in the country, and over sixty per cent of residential fires start in ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... revels in a pedigree, The sprouting of a noble tree 'Way back in prehistoric times; And for the "Family Record" true Of scions all that ever grew Would give a billion dimes. ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... told you, Mars is now but thirty-five millions of miles away, a difference in favor of Mars of twenty-two millions of miles, quite a distance when one has to travel it. Neptune, the farthest of the major planets, is two billion eight hundred millions of miles from the sun, and it is separated ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood

... in all, were ranked alongside awaiting loading and transportation. Except for the agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the place where we sat was pretty quiet. There were a million flies, and there seemed to be a billion. You wouldn't have thought, unless you had been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the world. By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe of its fly plague, but during the first ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... your own eyes, eh? Well, well! What do you cal'late 'twould have looked like if you'd borrered somebody else's eyes? Say, Posy, was it you fetched the billion and a half, or whatever 'twas, ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... because of the fewness of the watchbirds. A billion watchbirds couldn't have carried out the ambitious project set by ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley

... of business for a so-called American to be in!" said the head Secret Service man to Brown and Martell sternly. "I wouldn't be in your shoes for a billion dollars." ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield

... good or great evil to the free world's future. From the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the South Pacific one third of all mankind has entered upon an historic struggle for a new freedom; freedom from grinding poverty. Across all continents, nearly a billion people seek, sometimes almost in desperation, for the skills and knowledge and assistance by which they may satisfy from their own resources, the material wants common to ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... money meant nothing, would you not catch the blue eyes of the girl as she looked up at you, in the twilight of the big room, and answer, "All right, Jeanette"? Certainly if you had known a girl all your life, you would call her by her first name, if her father were worth a billion, and would you not continue, emboldened some way by not being frowned upon for calling her Jeanette, though she would have been astonished if you had said Miss Barclay—astonished and maybe a little fearful ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... and others, have given careful estimates of the direct cost of the war to nations and individuals. During the first and cheapest year, according to Mr. Rossiter, the total cost of the war, not including the economic value of the lives lost, rose to forty billion dollars. That is equal to all the national debts ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... age of the earth to be about two billion years, basing their conclusions on a study of lead pockets left as a result of radioactivity in rocks. The Hindu scriptures declare that an earth such as ours is dissolved for one of two reasons: the inhabitants as a whole become either completely good or completely evil. The world-mind ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... have an opportunity to develop her socialistic experiments, as she would be permitted to maintain only a very small army. The mistake of 1870 must not be repeated. This time there would be no paltry levy of five billion francs. A great German Empire would rise on the ruins of the British. Commercial gain was the theme. I did not gather from the conversation that anybody but Germany would be a party to ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... lungs with the oxygen in the inspired air, and they give up this indispensable substance to the cells everywhere in the body. There are also eight thousand leucocytes or colorless cells in a cubic millimeter of blood, this giving a total number of four billion in the average adult, and these vary in character and in relative numbers (Fig. 12). The most numerous of these are round and slightly larger than the red cells; they have a nucleus of peculiar shape and contain granules ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... the horses down the trail that slanted into the valley and crossed the half-mile of "flats" whose wire fences and long, clean-cut irrigation ditches marked the passing of the cattle country. A billion mosquitoes filled the air with an unceasing low-pitched drone, and settled upon the horses in a close-fitting blanket of gray. The girls tried to fight off the stinging pests that attacked their faces and necks in whirring ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... into the dark, the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was everywhere—among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine thinly between the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... we have mentioned, of one mile in a minute. This will give us a line one hundred and eighty miles long by one broad, and covering one hundred and eighty square miles. Now, allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have one billion, one hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock. As every pigeon consumes fully half a pint of food a day, the quantity required to feed such a flock for one day must be eight million, seven hundred ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen

... non-existent: for the Voice, being the essence of one's Being, cannot be thus changed at will. But come, suppose that I had the power of passing through solid things, so that I could penetrate my subjects, one after another, even to the number of a billion, verifying the size and distance of each by the sense of FEELING: How much time and energy would be wasted in this clumsy and inaccurate method! Whereas now, in one moment of audition, I take as it were the census and statistics, local, corporeal, mental and spiritual, of every living being ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... chanced upon a good, and warm, and steadfast heart. Every body is said to be born, whether that happens by night or day, with a certain little widowed star, which has lost its previous mortal, concentrating from a billion billion of miles, or leagues, or larger measure, intense, but generally invisible, radiance upon him or her; and to take for the moment this old fable as of serious meaning, my star was to find bad facts at a glance, but no bad ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... free to slave labor, the immense immigration, especially from Europe to the South, aided by the Homestead Bill, and the conversion of large plantations into small farms, an addition of at least one billion of dollars would be made in a decade, by the exclusion of slavery, to the value of the products ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... before time will be at an end, and the burden of flesh accomplished. But you hear it expressed in terms that will astonish Baron Rothschild, what is the progress in liquidation which we make for each particular century. A billion of centuries pays off a quantity equal to a pinch of snuff. Despair seizes a man in contemplating a single coupon, no bigger than a visiting card, of such a stock as this; and behold we have to keep on paying away until the total granite is reduced to a level with a grain of mustard-seed. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... lights visible and invisible. The imperfection of our eye as a detector of ether vibrations was, however, far more serious. The eye could detect ether vibrations lying within a single octave—between 400 to 800 billion vibrations per second. Comparatively slow vibrations of ether did not affect our eye and the disturbances they give rise to well-known as electric waves. The electric waves, predicted by Maxwell, were discovered by Hertz. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... war was over, after a day spent with President Wilson in learning the case for ratification of the Versailles Treaty: "Through the Treaty, we will yet get very much of importance.... In violation of all international law and treaties we have made disposition of a billion dollars of German-owned properly here. The Treaty validates all that."[77] The European Allies secured very similar advantages from inducing China to enter the war ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... Christian land, in city and country, this great man-eatin' trade costs the country over a billion dollars a year, and devours one hundred and twenty thousand men each year, and destroys the soul and mind first, ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley

... one generation has already been noted, and it is typical of the vital situation everywhere. English sparrows are killed by prolonged cold and snow as surely as by the hawk. The pond in which bacteria and protozoa are living may dry up, and these organisms may be killed by the billion. Even the human species cannot be regarded as exempt from the necessity of carrying on this kind of natural strife, for scores and hundreds die every year from freezing and sunstroke and the thirsts of the desert. Unknown thousands perish at sea from storm and shipwreck, while ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... arose, and tossed A billion gems across the sea. "The Slave of God is lost, is lost, The Slave of ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson

... t'e bacillus of t'e perfect vine and puts it in t'e cask of fresh grape juice, and soon t'e vine drinkers of t'e vorld svear it is t'e rare old vintage. T'e bacillus, inconceivably tiny, svarming vit' life, reproducing itself a billion from one, t'at is Nature's tool. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... The market for chickens and eggs in the United States would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!). It is solemnly recorded that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... savings so that they could buy at wholesale and share in the profits of the retailer, the Rochdale system has grown until the wholesale cooperative societies of England and Scotland are probably the largest general merchandising corporations in the world, doing a business of approximately a billion ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... floor all covered with rags of different shapes and sizes, no two of a kind. It wuz a curius time before he come, and a wild time, but what must have been the wildness, and the curosity when there wuz, to put a small estimate on it, nearly a billion of crazy lookin' rags scattered round on ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... aren't many right men," said Upton. "I've no doubt there's somebody equal to the occasion somewhere, but with the population of the world at the present figures there's a billion chances to one she'll never meet him. What do you think of the financial situation, ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs

... view it. The engine took us along at about six knots, and every gentle wave that broke was a lamp of loveliness. The wake of the Morning Star was a milky path lit with trembling fragments of brilliancy, and below the surface, beside the rudder, was a strip of green light from which a billion sparks of fire shot to the air. Far behind, until the horizon closed upon the ocean, our wake was curiously remindful of the boulevard of a great city seen through a mist, the lights fading in the dim distance, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... easy skeered, but I will admit I was a bit shaky then. I jest got inter the pinkey, pulled ther anchor, then tumbled back inter ther dory an' took ther old pinkey in tow. I wasn't very long gittin' out of Bold Island harbor, neether. I wouldn't 'a' stayed there that night fer a hundred billion dollars! I towed the pinkey clean to the Landin', an' you don't git me round Devil Island ag'in ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish

... be more specific.... In 1863 we had as a race 2,000 small business enterprises of one kind and another. At the present time, the Negro owns and operates about 43,000 concerns, with an annual turnover of about one billion dollars. Within fifty years we have made enough progress in business to warrant the operation of over fifty banks. With all I have said, we are still a poor race, as compared with many others; but I have given these figures to indicate the direction ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... kind to this tiger!" he mumbled. "He is in the hands of a witch. We shall find him as harmless as an old cat. Baboo will break out his teeth with a club of billion wood and bite off his claws with his ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman

... French Parliament voted war credits amounting to twenty billions of dollars. Of this enormous fund only two billions have been borrowed from outside sources; all the remainder has been subscribed or paid for by taxation or by loans in France herself. More than a billion dollars has been loaned to ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... night in a shimmering glow. Not a sound broke the stillness of the desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great amphitheater the frozen lake lay revealed in the light of the moon and a billion stars. Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding. Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... neck, and the hot tears told her heartfelt joy as she sobbed out: 'Charley, I thank you a thousand times. I never expected so nice a cloak. This seems like other days. You are so good, and I am so happy.'" The drink bill of our Nation for last year was over a billion of dollars, more money than was spent for missions—home and foreign—for all of our Churches, for public education, for all the operations of courts of justice and of public officers, and at least for two of the staple products of use in our country, such as furniture ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... finance seems turned into a delirium. Billions are voted where once a few poor millions were thought extravagant. The war debts of the Allied Nations, not yet fully computed, will run from twenty-five to forty billion dollars apiece. But the debts of the governments appear on the other side of the ledger as the assets of the citizens. What is the meaning of it? Is it wealth or is it poverty? The world seems filled with money and short of goods, while even in this very scarcity a new luxury has broken out. ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority belief, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... said Mr. Morey, "as usual, I'm in a position where I'm forced to yield. I might refuse financial backing, but you could sell any one of those gadgets for close to a billion dollars and finance the expedition independently, or you could, with your names, request the money publicly and back it that way." He paused a moment. "I am, however, thinking more in terms of your safety than in terms of money." There was another ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... vessels in the vast fleet of ships controlled by the American All- Seas and All-Ports Company, and she called wherever there was a port open to trans-Atlantic navigation. She was a single factor in the great monopoly described as the "Billion Dollar Boast." The United States had been slow to recognise the profits of seas that were free, but when she did wake up she proceeded to act as if she owned them and all that therein lay. Her people spoke of the Gulf Stream as "ours"; of the Banks of Newfoundland ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... movement, like one of the lifeless stubs left by fire; and Peter looked up, as his master was looking, trying to make out what it was he saw in the sky. And nothing was there—nothing that he had not seen many times before; a billion stars, and the moon riding King among them all, and fleecy clouds as if made of web, and stillness, a great stillness that was like sleep in the lap of ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... invented the telephone—that is, he made it work perfectly and brought it to the greatest commercial value, so that a billion men, women and children are using it in nearly all the languages and dialects in the civilized world. But he was very careful to give Dr. Alexander Graham Bell credit for his original work ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... commanded, huskily. "It's all right. You'll make good. I know that. And there's a chance in a billion that you'll come back to us. I'm—I'm not deserting you. And I guess there's precious little danger that any one on The Place will ever forget you. It's—it's all right. Millions of humans are doing it. I'd give everything I've got, if I could ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune

... country near Mona's home shows no sign of industry; there's nothing but parks and magnificent estates. And the geography explains it all. One of the planets is devoted entirely to industry and the homes of those who are engaged therein; the workers inhabit that globe exclusively. There are about ten billion of them. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... discover That you find in me the man and lover You have divined and visualized, In quiet day dreams. And what is strange Your boy of eight is subtly guised In fleeting looks that half resemble Something in me. Two souls may range Mid this earth's billion souls for life, And hide their hunger or dissemble. For there are two at least created, Endowed with alien powers that draw, And kindred powers that by some law Bind souls as like as sister, brother. There are two at least ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... Taliban in November 2001 and the formulation of the Afghan Interim Authority (AIA) resulting from the December 2001 Bonn Agreement, International efforts to rebuild Afghanistan were addressed at the Tokyo Donors Conference for Afghan Reconstruction in January 2002, when $4.5 billion was collected for a trust fund to be administered by the World Bank. Priority areas for reconstruction include the construction of education, health, and sanitation facilities, enhancement of administrative capacity, the development ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... above the cost of the production of the products of the soil which he sells, there is such an annual increment to the wealth of each country taken as a whole. Some experts have told me they calculated that, at the outside, in prosperous peace times the annual increment of German wealth is ten billion marks. ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard

... creating the world God distinguishes Himself from the world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, we shall no longer ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... going to Mrs. Van Billion's musicale tonight?' inquired the older of the two, a tall and striking demi-brunette, turning ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... to all in a language so universal that even the beasts understand it and cock applauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while the magazine writers now address the million, the composers and singers and players make their bows to the billion. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... millions of solar systems in the universe, some of them much greater than ours. There are uncounted planets in space, beside some of which our little earth is a mere toy. Some of these planets are doubtless inhabited. Even on this small earth there are over a billion people. I am one in a number so great that my mind can not grasp such a multitude. Countless billions have gone before and they got along very well before I was born. Countless billions will live and die after I have passed on, and if they hear of me it will probably be by accident. And so it ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... odors that drifted in the air set the dogs gathering upon their haunches beyond the waiting circle of masters, their lips dripping, their fangs snapping in an eagerness that was not for the flesh of battle. And above it all there gleamed down a billion stars from out of the skies, the aurora flung its banners through the pale night, and softly the smoke rose straight up and then floated into the North, carried there by the gentle breath that spring was luring from ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... dropped down, and May night had fallen soft and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and women. Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white shoulder, fit as a flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for anything but baby's slumber. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... Russian securities who are interested in the economic progress of Russia." Soon afterwards it became known that Alphonse de Rothschild, the head of the great financial firm in Paris, refused to take a hand in floating the Russian loan of half a billion. This first protest of the financial king against the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Government produced a sensation, and it was intensified by the fact that it was uttered in France at a time when the diplomats of both countries were preparing to celebrate the Franco-Russian ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... in his softly modulated voice, "I kinda guess there's a rat amongst us. I wouldn't like for to be that there rat—no, not for a billion hundred dollars. No, I wouldn't. Becuz that there rat has bit my little girlie, Eve,—like that there deer bit her up onto Star Peak.... No, I wouldn't like for to be that there rat. Fer he's a-goin' to die like a rat, same's that there deer is a-goin' ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers

... a matter-duplicator receiver misread OCH{3}CH{3}OH, to turn out a magnificently busted blonde sphygmomano-raiser with an HOCH{3}OH replacement, putting a strain on the loyalty of a billion teen-age girls dedicated to Doyle Oglevie worship. Doyle-she insisted she was Doyle-he, as it took quite a while for her hormones to overcome the memory of his easy, eyelash-flapping, tone-torturing microphone conquests. Put a strain on ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban

... you a bribe," said Thorn, his face a mask. "A billion dollars and immunity to cut off the ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... with change and even to welcome it because the time of troubles through which their society is passing is warning them of the dangers they face. At the same time they are learning, bit by bit, of the spectacular achievements of the billion human beings in ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... Ohio as examples, but the effect of glaciation in those States does not differ materially from its effect all over southern Canada and the northern United States from New England to Kansas and Minnesota. Each year the people of these regions are richer by perhaps a billion dollars because the ice scraped its way down from Laurentia and spread out over the borders of the great plains on the west and of the ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... a third form of that energy of which we have already treated two manifestations—heat and electricity. The distinguishing characteristic of ether light-waves is their extreme rapidity of vibration, which has been calculated to range from 700 billion movements per second for violet rays to 400 billion for ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... and vigor in his expression when, rising from his chair and standing with clenched fist pointed at me, he said in substance:—'The President ought to send for Schwab and hand him a treasury warrant for a billion dollars and set him to work building ships, with no government inspectors or supervisors or accountants or auditors or other red tape to bother him. Let the President just put it up to Schwab's patriotism ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... day. During the American crisis in 1907 the bank rate in England went up to seven per cent, forcing many British concerns to suspend operations. Because of the Balkan War the bank rate in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna is the highest in twenty years, and European securities have depreciated over six billion dollars. Foreign investments are raising insuperable barriers to war. Should the French bombard Hamburg to-day they would destroy the property of Frenchmen. Let Emperor William capture London, loot the Bank of England, and he will return to find German industry ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... I said, 'it is like this. While they are still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide waters,—silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim and pick it up. The mother, who has a contract ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... was started in England 73 years ago, eliminates most of these waste expenses. The system has kept spreading at an astonishing rate; in Great Britain there are now 3 1/2 million members, and more than a billion of sales a year. Other European countries are full of these stores. Many of the retail stores have from twelve thousand to fifty thousand members; their sales run into the millions. They are federated in a wholesale ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... particle with individual sense of endless misery? What if there be a hell! In a few minutes, or what will seem but a few minutes —for surely, to the disembodied spirit, time cannot exist; though it sleep a billion years, it will be as a breath—I shall have solved the problem. I shall know what all the panic-stricken millions madly ask, and ask in vain! Yes, I shall know if there is a hell! Well, if there be, then I shall rule there, for power is native to my soul. Let me hesitate no longer, but go and solve ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... what I don't know, but I'll bet a million billion dollars there is something else besides just all this war stuff. I can't tell it, I just feel it. Anyhow, I'm to stay here with Aunty Boone till you come back. Girls can be trusted anywhere, but it may take the whole Army of the West, yet, to follow ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... upon what may have happened millions of years ago. What does it matter? Here we are—face to face with the same facts. Fitzjames, in fact, agreed, though I fancy unconsciously, with Comte, who condemned such speculations as 'otiose.' To know what the world was a billion years ago matters no more than to know what there is on the other side of the moon, or whether there is oxygen in the remotest of the fixed stars. He looked with indifference, therefore, upon the application of such theories to ethical or political problems. The ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... there before his eyes, and represented a treasure of probably half a billion dollars in ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... migration of nations point to one locality where the human race began in times not more remote, and show that man was created in a civilized state, and, therefore, never was a brute. If evolution were true, there would have been many billion times as many human beings as now exist, a great multitude of invented languages with little or no similarity, a vast number of invented religions with little, if anything, in common. Even the sciences invented and exploited by evolutionists, the Mendelian Inheritance ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... any diamonds. For another; no rajah could possibly have the wealth involved. Why, do you know that since this plot unfolded, over five million carats' worth have made their appearance—and that means something like a billion dollars." ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... source or origin with the velocity of light. If these aetherial waves so generated fall within certain limits, then they affect the eye, and we get the sensation of sight. To do this they must vibrate 5000 billion times per second, and if they fail to do this, they fail to give rise to the sensation of sight. If the aetherial waves fall below this limit, then they affect the body, and give rise to the sensation of heat. For it must be remembered, that as the ear has a certain compass for sound waves, which ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... seems a stupendous time, but it is nothing compared with the time needed to form a nebula into a planetary system. If we had five thousand of such years, with every second in them a year, we should then only have counted one billion real years, and billions must have passed since the sun was a gaseous nebula filling the outermost bounds ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton

... very harsh in his terms of peace. France was condemned to pay an indemnity of 5,000,000,000 francs (nearly one billion dollars) and certain parts of France were to be occupied by the German troops until this money was fully paid. Two counties of France, Alsace and Lorraine, were to be annexed to Germany. Alsace was inhabited largely by people of German descent, but there were many French ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet

... that in the forty years between 1868 and 1908, forty agreements, treaties, and conventions had been concluded between the two countries. Nor was intimacy confined to the Governments. The peace arranged by President Diaz had brought foreign capital by the billion to aid the internal development of the country, and of this money more had come from the United States than from any other nation. Nor was it financial aid alone which had gone across the border. ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... vegetable fiber, the yearly crop being over six billion pounds, of which the United States raises three-fourths. Texas is the largest producer, followed by Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The remainder of the world supply comes chiefly from India, Egypt, Russia, and Brazil. The Hindoos were the first ancient people to make extensive use ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson

... carry out their missions without adequate equipment. Congress has been generous in funding requests for U.S. troops, but it has resisted fully funding Iraqi forces. The entire appropriation for Iraqi defense forces for FY 2006 ($3 billion) is less than the United States currently spends in Iraq ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace

... of the Hohenzollern, who ate up her two babies when she found they disturbed her gentleman friend, hovering over the scene like Schumann-Heink in the Rheingold,—I would not release that reel for less than a billion dollars down! ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... "Suppose once in a billion ages a bird should come from a far distant clime and carry off in its bill one little grain of sand, the time would finally come when the last grain of sand would be carried away. Do ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... talent of silver is, as estimated, about L390, or $1950, it would seem that the silver accumulated by David would have amounted to nearly two billion dollars, and the gold to a like sum,—altogether four billions, which is plainly impossible. Probably there is a mistake in the figures. We read in the twenty-ninth chapter of Chronicles that David gave to Solomon, out of his own private property, three thousand talents of gold and seven thousand ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... to the transformer, and short-circuited it, not knowing, of course, just what he was doing. The result was that when Tode pressed that lever, instead of blowing the whole contraption to pieces, he got a couple of billion volts of electricity through his body, combined with a larger amperage than has ever been imagined. It burned him to a few grease spots. He simply—vanished. You don't remember what you ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... only tie in the first round the rest being byes—we arrive at the result that there were 268,435,457 teams or 1,073,741,828 men playing. Might not just a small percentage of these, if brought over to France, decide the issue at once in favour of the Allies? Some of the four or five billion ponies might also be utilised for remounts and for transport. Nor should the committee which successfully managed this tournament be lost sight of. They showed a power of organisation which could scarcely fail to be of use ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various

... Sounds from thy harp proceed; Combustible as reed, The tongue of Vulcan licks thy wooden legs: From Drury's top, dissever'd from thy pegs, Thou tumblest, Humblest, Where late thy bright effulgence shone on high; While, by thy somerset excited, fly Ten million Billion Sparks from the pit, to gem the sable sky. Now come the men of fire to quench the fires: To Russell Street see Globe and Atlas run, Hope gallops first, and second Sun; On flying heel, See Hand-in-Hand O'ertake the band! View with what glowing wheel He nicks Phoenix! ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... good-humoured simple wife. They had made a fortnight's tour, during which they had been exceedingly happy; and there was something so frank and touching in the way in which the kind creature flung her all into his lap, saluting him with a hearty embrace at the same time, and wishing that it were a thousand billion billion times more, so that her darling Howard might enjoy it, that the man would have been a ruffian indeed could he have found it in his heart to be angry with her; and so he kissed her in return, and patted her on the shining ringlets, and then counted over the notes with rather ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... world-wide plague to turn the tide. The plague began in old China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world. It might have been a laboratory mutation, but ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey

... universe, two billion years ago, there too a planet coalesced from the mutually attracted vortices of twisted space; gases compelled by gravitational forces solidifying to hardened matter, forming a crust over a molten core. In the soupy atmosphere of metallic ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... paltry twenty billion dollars a year were spent on Xmas—sorry, sir—on Christmas Gratuities, back before my Bureau came on the scene to triple that figure, to bring ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang

... the Lord printed one volume, he destroyed the plates. Mr. Parker, sir—" He stepped up to John Parker and smote the latter lightly on the breast—"Tag; you're it!" he announced pleasantly. "I'll cancel this contract when you hand me a certified check; for twenty-four billion, nine-hundred and eighty-two million, four hundred and seventeen thousand, six hundred and one dollars, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... have known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... and lie with my eyes on the stars-pin- hole windows to God's glory. Sometimes I can't sleep—I get so full of worship. I was reading the other day that it would take a fast train forty million years to get to the nearest fixed star. Isn't that awful? And think of it, when you got there, a billion times more would lie beyond—so much more that you wouldn't even then have touched the fringe of the wonderful scheme. It is too big for the mind of man to grasp, and so is the other, the realm of spirit, which is, after all, the main thing—in ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... "For the first six months they reported on schedule, remember? A fine clean planet, no dominant life-forms, perfect for immigration; unique, one world in a billion. Abruptly they stopped sending. ...
— Competition • James Causey

... filled our little planet till it tends to running o'er, Will this world, with souls o'erladen, be a Hades or an Aidenn? Will man, woman, boy and maiden, be less civilised, or more? That's the question, RAVENSTEIN! What boots a billion, less or more, If Man still is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various

... to the Great Lakes. In actual cash this cost Canada four hundred million dollars, not counting land grants and private subscriptions for stock, which would bring up the cost of binding the provinces together to a billion. This was a staggering burden for a country with smaller population than Greater New York—a burden as big as Japan and Russia assumed for their war; but, like war, the expenditure was a fight for national existence. Without the railroads and canals, the provinces could ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... it's something like a billion and a half. If that is true, then it's possible that there are four people in the world, beside yourself, with the thumb and two fingers of the right hand ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson

... and current account deficits, fast-growing external debt, and persistent corruption. Even though GDP growth reached only 2.2% in 2000, the year was marked by positive developments such as foreign direct investment of $1.5 billion, strong export performance, restructuring and privatization in the banking sector, entry into the OECD, and initial efforts to stem corruption. Strong challenges face the government in 2001, especially the maintenance of fiscal balance, the further privatization of the economy, and the ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the "war boom." Gradually it has spread, bringing such enormous profits in all our lines of business supplying the needs of the "Great War," that the first twelve months of it showed more than a billion dollars trade balance in our favor, and that balance then began increasing on a progressive scale. Money is yet plentiful. All business is stimulated. Our crops are unexampled in quantity and money value. Everything points to great prosperity unchecked until the "Great War" ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar

... come to be arranged in these convenient circles because, as will be explained later on, the moths have been induced to lay within bottomless round tins placed on the circles on the cards. The eggs are sticky when laid and therefore adhere. In a year 35,000,000 cards, containing about a billion eggs, are produced on ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... aggregate product of our gold and silver mines approaches now one billion of dollars, most of which has been converted into coin at our mint. Nearly all of this product has been obtained since the discovery of gold in California. Less than two per cent. of the precious metals ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... Estelle! Nothing in Blodgett and Blatherwick's notes about Estelle. "A whole directory of names," as Judge Blodgett had said, but no Estelle. The world full of useless people—a billion and a half of them—and not an Estelle at poor Amidon's call in this time of need. Hence this ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountains from ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... hair along the nape of your neck! Jokes about your own town's soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile," she confided proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar French cars. And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store. But we used to ride home ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... and persuasive pleas - I tire, I tire of these; But I, the Maker of a billion suns, Ask men to stop the blasphemy of guns.' This ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... costs she had by October, 1917, loaned eight hundred million dollars to the Dominions and five billion five hundred million to the Allies. She raised five billion in thirty days. In the first eight months of 1918 she contributed to the various forms of war loan at the average rate of one hundred and twenty-four million, eight ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... dome of heaven was punctuated by a billion dots of steely white that looked like pin-pricks. All the light there was came from the fitful watch-fires, where even the wagons were being burned now that the meagre supply of rough timber was giving out. The rebels, ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... uv them green trees a thousand feet high toward that ornery lookin' long-legged feller what wuz new to the place, stretch out your right hand to him, an' say: 'Welcome to Heaven Long Jim Hart. Come right in an' make yourself to home, 'cause you're goin' to live with us a million an' a billion years, an' all the rest uv the time thar is. Your fishin' pole is down thar by the bank. I've been savin' it fur you. Henry is 'bout a mile farther up the stream pullin' in a whale two hundred feet ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... that she wrote the letter. 13. The invention of electricity has revolutionized all manufactures. 14. Who learned her to sing? 15. Edison discovered the phonograph. 16. One cannot comprehend the enormity of a billion of dollars. 17. Many complements were paid to her beauty. 18. His consciousness pricked him. 19. How could any one be guilty of such a cruel action. 20. The advancement of the army was ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... obese as helpless victims of serotonin imbalances and to "treat" them with the same kinds of serotonin-increasing happy drugs (like Prozac) that are becoming so popular with the psychiatric set. This promises to be a multiple billion dollar business that will capture all the money currently flowing into other dieting systems and bring it right back to the AMA/drug company/FDA nexus. The pitch is that when serotonin levels are upped, the desire to eat drops and so is weight. This approach ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... street lamps about twenty-five thousand burn gas. This single instance is representative of gas-lighting which initiated the "light age" and nursed it through the vicissitudes of youth. The consumption of gas has grown in the United States during this time to three billion cubic feet per day. For strictly illuminating purposes in 1910 nearly one hundred billion cubic feet were used. This country has been blessed with large supplies of natural gas; but as this fails new oil-fields are constantly being discovered, so that as far as raw materials are concerned the future ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... of September, the whole million was gone, including the amounts won in Lumber and Fuel and other luckless enterprises. He still had about $17,000 of his interest money in the banks, but he had a billion pangs in his heart—the interest ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon

... friendship with every government of the world. Our foreign commerce has shown great increase in volume and value. The combined imports and exports for the year are the largest ever shown by a single year in all our history. Our exports for 1899 alone exceeded by more than a billion dollars our imports and exports combined in 1870. The imports per capita are 20 per cent less than in 1870, while the exports per capita are 58 per cent more than in 1870, showing the enlarged capacity of the United States to satisfy the wants of its own increasing population, as well as to contribute ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... million and a half men drawn out of the country and ten billion dollars to be expended on war material, making every ammunition factory a labor magnet, it seems like the smooth deceptions of prestidigitation to answer the cry of the farmer with suggestion that men rejected by the draft or high ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch

... Dunsaney's play, opens on to the vastness of the stars. What is it that baffles us and remains undefined and undefinable? Just this: TAO: the Infinite Nature. You can survey the earth, and measure it with chains; but not Space, in which a billion leagues is nowise different from an inch or two, —it bears the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... the canyon has got a billion bottles of booze. Worst whiskey you ever smelled. He says he's laying for you and if you cross his ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow

... 'lion-port;' and, to do her justice, she conducted herself with great coolness upon the occasion; but then it may be observed, that it was I who was to stand fire, and not she. I thought of poor Lawless a billion of times, at least, as we were going to the ground; and I had my presentiments, and my confused notions of poetic justice: but poetic justice, and all other sorts of justice, went clear out of my head, when I saw my antagonist and her friend, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... find him. He had escaped the jaws of the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very wide door; he had escaped the albicore and squid: his life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him born in the same year, he and a few ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... Norcross-Brail engines, each capable of developing 1,150 H.P. The engines were in charge of Auchincloss and two assistant engineers, who had all six engines filling the room with a drowsy drone, like ten billion bees humming themselves to sleep ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, a hundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people—and we were on the defensive in our own space-area! Every move we made was known and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done that without ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper



Words linked to "Billion" :   US, one million million, Great Britain, the States, cardinal, large indefinite quantity, Britain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, million, trillion, jillion, one thousand million, U.S.A., UK, America, United Kingdom, United States of America, U.S., United States, zillion, billion-dollar grass, 1000000000000, USA, large integer, milliard, 1000000000, large indefinite amount, gazillion



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