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/ˈɡɪljən/ · numeral
(British, rare) A thousand million, proposed as an alternative to the (now little used) British milliard and the (ambiguous, in the UK) US billion..
The internationally agreed symbol for 10^6 is M and this is the initial letter of million. Would it not be logical and convenient to turn this happy accident into a principle and use G, the internationally agreed symbol for 10^9, as the initial letter of the word for 1,000,000,000? That number would thus be called a gillion. Whether the g should be hard or soft is a matter of opinion. I incline to hard because of the derivation from giga.
At Guy's school there had been an outdoor pool, in use from April to October, a watery grave for a billion insects, or quite possibly a gillion or a squillion. The bright turquoise lining had wrinkled under the children's feet.
I looked down to see my dog, Roof, short for Rufus, curled in sleep below the window, unworried by the wings of hummingbirds whirring at speeds of a gillion miles an hour as they flitted in and out of the trumpets of honeysuckle growing on the side of the house.
Use gillion when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Gillion means (British, rare) A thousand million, proposed as an alternative to the (now little used) British milliard and the (ambiguous, in the UK) US billion..
The closest synonym depends on the sentence and intended sense.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
The internationally agreed symbol for 10^6 is M and this is the initial letter of million. Would it not be logical and convenient to turn this happy accident into a principle and use G, the internationally agreed symbol for 10^9, as the initial letter of the word for 1,000,000,000? That number would thus be called a gillion. Whether the g should be hard or soft is a matter of opinion. I incline to hard because of the derivation from giga.
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