Billions (short Scale) to Yi / Oku (B to yi)
1 billion (short scale) equals 10 yi / oku exactly.
How to convert billions (short scale) to yi / oku
To convert billions (short scale) to yi / oku, multiply the number of billions (short scale) by 10. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply yi / oku by 0.1.
yi / oku = billions (short scale) × 10
Example: 10 billions (short scale) = 100 yi / oku.
Large-number names differ around the world: this site uses the short scale (billion = 10⁹) by default, and lists the long-scale billion separately.
About these units
Billion (short Scale) (B)
One thousand million (10⁹). The meaning used in the US, UK and most English-speaking countries today.
For decades British and American speakers meant different things by billion. The short-scale sense, a thousand million, took hold in the United States in the 19th century, while Britain kept the older meaning of a million million. From the 1950s the short scale spread through British technical writing and journalism, and Winston Churchill had remarked in 1941 that for practical financial purposes a billion was a thousand millions.
The official break came on December 20, 1974. Asked in Parliament whether ministers would be required to use the traditional British meaning, Prime Minister Harold Wilson answered no, explaining that billion was now used internationally for 1,000 million and that using it any other way would cause confusion. He conceded it could still be read as a million million and asked colleagues to avoid ambiguity. Today a billion is 10⁹, matching the SI prefix giga, and the UN projected that world population would reach 8 billion on November 15, 2022.
1 billion (short scale) = 1,000,000,000 pieces (exactly).
Sources: Hansard, 20 Dec 1974: Billion (Definition), written answer; Wikipedia: Billion; United Nations: Day of Eight Billion
Yi / Oku (East Asian) (yi)
One hundred million (10⁸), written 億 / 亿 in Chinese and Japanese (oku) and Korean (eok). East Asian counting groups numbers by myriads.
Chinese counting does not group digits in threes. It groups them in fours, so 1,234,567,890 is read as 12 yi, 3456 wan, 7890. Wan is 10,000 and yi is 10,000 times wan, giving 100,000,000. In Japanese the same character is read oku and in Korean eok. The yi is therefore a pure number with no physical dimension, and its base here is simply one.
This myriad system differs from English, which builds on thousands. One million is 100 wan, and one billion in the short scale is 10 yi, since these languages have no native words for powers of one thousand. Ancient texts wrote 10,000 squared as wan wan before yi became the name. Older usage differed, and yi once stood for 10 to the 5th. The next unit, zhao, is 10 to the 12th in Taiwan, Japan and Korea, but mainland China has used it for a million, so official documents avoid it.
1 yi / oku (East Asian) = 100,000,000 pieces (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Chinese numerals; Wikipedia: Myriad
Related conversions
- Yi / oku to billions (short scale) (reverse)
- Billions (short scale) to pieces
- Billions (short scale) to dozens
- Billions (short scale) to lakhs
- Billions (short scale) to millions
- Billions (short scale) to crores
- Billions (short scale) to pairs
- Billions (short scale) to hundred
- Billions (short scale) to gross
- Billions (short scale) to thousand
- Billions (short scale) to trillions (short scale)
- Billions (short scale) to score
- Billions (short scale) to half dozens
- Pieces to yi / oku
- Dozens to yi / oku
- Lakhs to yi / oku
- Millions to yi / oku
- Crores to yi / oku
See all counting & quantity units.