But after this item was published people started asking me other questions and so, 1100 or so weeks later, the column is still going.

I don’t know who publishes it, but I have received responses from London and California.

Many years ago I attended dinner at a local RSL club with a group of Japanese businessmen. As we approached the front door a senior member of the group asked me “how much is a billion?”

My answer was that the definition of a billion depended on which country he was in. I said at the time that a billion was a million million in England and a thousand million in the USA.

The definition of a billion still causes some occasional confusion in this country, although we are rapidly coming around to the American definition. 

Fowler's Modern English Usage says of billion, trillion and quadrillion: “It should be remembered that these words do not mean in American (which follows the French) use what they mean in British English. For us they mean the second, third, fourth, power of a million. A billion is a million millions, a trillion a million million millions...

For Americans they mean a thousand multiplied by itself twice, three times, four times, so a billion is a thousand thousand thousands or a thousand millions, a trillion is a thousand thousand thousand thousands or a million millions.”

In 1991, probably just after the Japanese visitor asked me the question – and I never ascertained why he asked the question – I compared notes with style authority Alan Peterson of the Sydney Morning Herald.

In a letter of reply to my query, possibly because he and I had attended the same school, he agreed the word was confusing, “because the change in its meaning from a million million to a thousand million is not quite complete”.

Peterson said Britain had persisted with the million million definition of a billion for a long time, but by the 70s most of the British press had gone over to the thousand million standard. The Australian press did likewise.

“By this time, even the official statisticians were using a billion to mean a thousand million in informal use,” Peterson said.

Not many people seem to remember the good old word milliard, that once meant a thousand million.

But it all seems to mean that becoming a billionaire in Australia is now a thousand times easier.