Robert Krulwich learns to count again:
Apparently, 40 years ago, the British had different names for big numbers, different from ours. A "milliard" was what we now call a "billion," or a thousand million. What they called a "billion" was a 1 with 12 zeros after it (which we call a "trillion"). So they counted differently. Who knew? I thought everybody counted like us, but no, they didn't, and even today, in much of the world big numbers have different names.
The Dish 