When a billion is not a billion

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/114

A more erudite colleague has just pointed this fact to me when I mentioned that the human genome has 3 billion base pairs...


In British English, a billion used to be equivalent to a million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000), while in American English it has always equated to a thousand million (i.e. 1,000,000,000).