English is handy enough to have two "scales", where these words have different meanings.

In the short scale, you'd be right, but the author probably uses the long scale.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_scale#Comparison.

It's one of those things that makes English ... interesting to learn as a foreign language. :)

EDIT: Actually no, I mis-read the table on the Wikipedia page. The author was simply mistaken, and has corrected that. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out.

In Polish, there's one standard: million, milliard, billion. Every time I see some article in the press that tells about "billions" and seems to be based on some foreign data, I have to stop and think whether the author cited the original value unchanged, or converted it.

Also, basically no-one uses the long scale anymore. Which is a shame. -illiard is a fantastic suffix.

Well, if no-one is pretty much all the non-english-speaking world, then yes.

The Chinese don't use the long scale either, at least not in this form - we count in magnitudes of 10,000.

I wasn't aware of that. To be sincere, I also made the mistake of looking too close home. I was mostly talking about the non-English-speaking 'western hemisphere'.

So are thousands of billions called billiards? :)

Yes, it appears they are. In long scale it's million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion, trilliard etc.

Long-scale should be officially retired, it's needless. Keep rocking with fortnights and stone if you must, nobody else is laying claim to those.

It's things like having three different "gallons" that all mean wildly different things that make communication difficult.

Or perhaps short-scale should be retired instead, since pretty much all other languages use long-scale anyway.

Short's as much as a standard and pairs well with SI units. Long's an anachronism in comparison.

No. The long scale of 420,081,335,014 would be 420 milliards, short scale being 420 billion.

I'm a native English speaker (USA) with lots of math and science education, and I'd never heard of the long scale until you posted this article.

It sounds so strange. Are you sure this isn't another Wikipedia hoax masterminded by Stephen Colbert?

In the long scale ins't 420 trillons either, it's 420 millards.

Source: your link.

Long scale makes HIGHER numbers use LOWER terms, so you're completely backwards on this.

Fixed. I suck at numbers. :P (or rather, fixed, but the server is getting hammered enough that it won't let me flush the cache)

There was another screenshot which has an account balance in the trillions that Blizzard argued was fabricated. Given the ease in which this trick was performed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was authentic.

If Blizzard says it's fabricated they're probably right. They're certainly in a position to know and have no motive to lie.

Probably. I'm not a huge fan of Blizzard's business model and design choices as of late, but I do trust that they would not straight-faced lie versus fakeable screenshots. They know their back-end.