A SPANISH-speaking friend recently pointed out that a once-inconsequential linguistic ambiguity has started to become, well, consequential.

America has traditionally used the "short scale" of number-naming, in which each successive name (million, billion, trillion) adds three zeroes to the number, so a billion is a 1 followed by nine zeroes, or 109. In Britain and Europe the norm was the long scale, which adds six zeroes, so a billion was 1012.

In 1974 Britain adopted the short scale, presumably to avoid confusion in international business and finance. Other languages continued calling a billion either a thousand million (eg, Spanish, mil millones) or a "milliard" (eg, French and Russian), an old French term that originally meant 1012 but began to change in the 17th century.

All this was basically fine, my friend contends, until a few years ago. Suddenly, people all around the world began discussing the cost of the war in Iraq (estimated at up to $3 trillion), the size of America's debt (currently $14.3 trillion) and of its future obligations (around $62 trillion). Now the costs of a euro collapse are being estimated in the trillions, and a common fund is being proposed to guarantee European governments' liabilities to the tune of up to €2.3 trillion.

And how are such numbers being treated on the continent? Rather inconsistently, if my very brief search is anything to go by. Le Monde quotes a statement by Total, a French energy company, about the discovery of a large gas field with "un potentiel de plusieurs trillions" of cubic feet—the company's wording, which, the paper obligingly explains, means milliers de milliards. In another story, however, it says that renminbi deposits in Hong Kong are expected to rise from 360 milliards (long scale) at the end of 2010 to 2 trillions (short scale) by the end of 2012. And when discussing an apparent $2 trillion error in Standard & Poor's calculation of the United States' national debt, the paper refers to it as both 2 000 milliards and 2 trillions in the same paragraph (and is rapped on the knuckles by a reader in the comments).

Le Monde does at least seem to have made a policy decision not to use the word billion, since the only references that come up when you search for it are to people: Billion is a French surname. In Spain, on the other hand, El País, in a roundup of foreign media coverage, refers to the plan to boost the European Financial Stability Facility to €1 trillion, which it calls a billón de euros [trillón, según la contabilidad estadounidense] ("trillion, by the American count"). On the other hand, an article about earthquakes says that the construction industry moves 7,5 trillones de dólares a year, which, if it were on the long scale, would make the industry worth about 16,000 times global GDP. And so on.

Rooting around online I've found plenty of discussions of this phenomenon, but so far they all seem to consist of people correcting each other's usage—nobody proposing how to deal with the ambiguity. If you know of a serious attempt to do so anywhere, please put it in the comments.