What's in a Number?

L. Chris Miller's article ``Transborder Tips and Traps'' (June) is interesting but inaccurate when referring to U.K. practice. She claims a billion refers to ``1 followed by 12 zeros.'' The statement, ``Therefore a BBC announcer says `one-thousand-million dollars' where an American would say `one billion dollars,''' is untrue. We have followed American practice for at least 20 years. Today's London Times talks of a U.K. public sector borrowing 4 billion pounds, without needing to explain that this means 4,000,000,000. She also said, ``Apple's Trashcan icon, for example, looked like a postal box to British Macintosh users.'' I know, however, that although I find the word Trashcan jarring, the icon looks like a slightly old-fashioned dustbin of the sort inhabited by Top Cat.

Graham Asher

London, U.K.

We called the British Consulate in Boston, Mass achusetts, to ask for the official value for one billion in the U.K. Representatives there responded that Miller is correct: Officially, in the U.K., one billion is a million million, whereas in the U.S., one billion equals a thousand million. Unofficially, practice does vary.--Eds.