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noun
Billion  n.  According to the French and American method of numeration, a thousand millions, or 1,000,000,000; according to the English method, a million millions, or 1,000,000,000,000. See Numeration.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Billion" Quotes from Famous Books



... a heap too gloomy a religion for a niggah, sah. Dey lams loose at me wid foreord'nation an' preedest'nation, an' how d' bad place is paved wid chil'ens skulls, an' how so many is called, an' only one in a billion beats d' gate; an' fin'lly, las' Sunday, B'rer Peters, he's d' preacher, he ups an' p'ints at me in speshul an' says he sees in a dream how I'm b'ar-hung an' breeze-shaken over hell; an', sah, he simply scare dis ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... to know what I don't know, but I'll bet a million billion dollars there is something else besides just all this war stuff. I can't tell it, I just feel it. Anyhow, I'm to stay here with Aunty Boone till you come back. Girls can be trusted anywhere, but it may take the whole Army of the West, yet, to follow up and look after two little runty ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... "There are about five thousand cherry-colored cross-town cars in this town. There are about five million white hats and dresses in this borough. There are five billion girls wearing 'em——!" "Yes; but the wicker basket" breathed Brown. "How do you account for that?... And, anyway, you annoy me, Smith. Why don't you get out of the car ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers

... Grabbing the last brown quail from off the plate, Shouted, "For gods alone such food"; and bade Dian to skip, with bow well bent, and bring A billion ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... hectares. This liquid mass totals 2,250,000,000 cubic miles and could form a sphere with a diameter of sixty leagues, whose weight would be three quintillion metric tons. To appreciate such a number, we should remember that a quintillion is to a billion what a billion is to one, in other words, there are as many billions in a quintillion as ones in a billion! Now then, this liquid mass nearly equals the total amount of water that has poured through all the earth's rivers for the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... stages of growth, but these are invisible to us. Here and there amongst them we find luminous patches or 'nebulae,' which prove to be either clusters of stars or stupendous clouds of glowing gases. Our sun is a solitary blue star on the verge of the Milky Way, 20 billion miles from Alpha Centauri his next-door neighbour. He is travelling in a straight line towards the constellation Hercules at the rate of 20,000 miles an hour, much quicker than a rifle bullet; and, nevertheless, he will take more than a million ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... respective souls or selves in popular philosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like a joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. If our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing our billion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts. But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active principles called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having, as it thinks, definitively demolished them. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... the bacteriologic batteries appears to have been intrusted the most hopeless task, the forlorn hope,—the total extermination of a foe so tiny that he had to be magnified five hundred times before he was even visible, and of such countless myriads that he was at least a billion times as numerous as the human race. But here again, as in the centre of the battle-line, when we once made up our minds to fight, we were not long in discovering points of attack and weapons to assault ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... toward that ornery lookin' long-legged feller what wuz new to the place, stretch out your right hand to him, an' say: 'Welcome to Heaven Long Jim Hart. Come right in an' make yourself to home, 'cause you're goin' to live with us a million an' a billion years, an' all the rest uv the time thar is. Your fishin' pole is down thar by the bank. I've been savin' it fur you. Henry is 'bout a mile farther up the stream pullin' in a whale two hundred feet long that he's had his eye on fur some time. ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... him for the name, but admitted it a good one. That mine today, reader, is one of the greatest copper properties in the world. It is worth about a billion dollars. The syndicate that owns it owns as well a ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady

... treatment of even a large reservoir may be accomplished in from four to six hours. It is necessary, of course, to reduce as much as possible the time required for applying the copper, so that for immense supplies, with a capacity of several billion gallons, it would probably be desirable to use a launch, carrying long projecting spars to which could be attached bags containing several hundred pounds ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various

... known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... his heel to the granite,) before time will be at an end, and the burden of flesh accomplished. But you hear it expressed in terms that will astonish Baron Rothschild, what is the progress in liquidation which we make for each particular century. A billion of centuries pays off a quantity equal to a pinch of snuff. Despair seizes a man in contemplating a single coupon, no bigger than a visiting card, of such a stock as this; and behold we have to keep on paying away until the total granite is reduced to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... American manufacture, however, that merits more detailed attention. If we scan the manufacturing statistics of 1917, one amazing fact stares us in the face. There are only three American industries whose product has attained the billion mark; one of these is steel, the other food products, while the third is an industry that was practically unknown in the United States fifteen years ago. Superlatives come naturally to mind in discussing American progress, but hardly any extravagant phrases could do justice to ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... a country twelve hundred miles in length and three hundred in breadth, many parts of which are exceedingly fertile, and capable of sustaining a large population. As a colony, however, Algeria has not been a profitable investment. It took eighteen years to subdue it, at a cost of one billion francs, and the annual expense of maintaining it exceeds one hundred million francs. The condition of colonists there has generally been miserable; and while the imports in 1845 were one hundred million francs, the exports were only about ten millions. The great importance of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine. (For three years France had to endure the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... pine-cone, a prey to anything that might find him. He had escaped the jaws of the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very wide door; he had escaped the albicore and squid: his life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him born in the same year, he and a ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... a scale so gargantuan that we could never hope nor desire to approach it. Three million tons of matter go into that colossal furnace every second of time, and out of that comes two and a half decillion ergs of energy. With a total of two and a half million billion billion billions of ergs to draw on, man will have nothing to worry about for a good many years to come! That represents a flood of power vaster than man could comprehend. Why try to release any more energy? We ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... "Suppose once in a billion ages a bird should come from a far distant clime and carry off in its bill one little grain of sand, the time would finally come when the last grain of sand would be carried ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... world, as a poet is distinct from his poem—a truth which he has condensed into an aphorism, {28} "All creation is separation"; but on the part of the Deity such "separation" implies of necessity the self-limitation just spoken of. Just as a billion, minus the billionth fraction of a unit, is no longer a billion, so infinity itself, limited though it be but by a hair's-breadth, is no longer, strictly speaking, infinite. Once we admit this Divine self-limitation as a working theory, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... distribution of its circulation. Between 1870 and 1890 the number of newspapers published and the aggregate circulation increased almost exactly threefold—about five times as fast as the population was growing. In the latter year the entire circulation for the country was over four and a half billion copies, of which about sixty per cent. were dailies. So great had been the growth of the press during the seventies that the census authorities in 1880 made a careful study of the statistical aspects of the subject. ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... meditated also about politics, logic, philosophy, political economy, ethics—everything. Socrates was a causeur, but he was also a martyr. No, after all the Beautiful is not so important as you imagine you are. No doubt for a few billion years painters and musicians and epigrammatists will remain the centre cf creation; but when the sun grows cold it is conceivable that invaluable canvases may be used up as fuel, and that humanity may sacrifice ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... Forward on either side shot out the horns of armed men, clasping the camp in an embrace of steel. Then as these began to close, out burst the war cry of the Zulus, and with the roar of a torrent and the rush of a storm, with a sound like the humming of a billion bees, wave after wave the deep breast of the impi rolled down upon the white men. With it went the black-shielded Umcityu and with them went Nahoon, the son of Zomba. A bullet struck him in the side, glancing from his ribs, ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard

... the hull story, Theodore, I could throw statistics at you till you wuz black and blue, about our country spendin' for what is useless and ruinous to soul, body and estate, one billion four hundred millions a year, and about the hundred thousand drunkards that stumble along into the staggerin' slobberin' ranks every year, and drop into the drunkard's grave. I could eppisode eloquent to you about ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... locality where the human race began in times not more remote, and show that man was created in a civilized state, and, therefore, never was a brute. If evolution were true, there would have been many billion times as many human beings as now exist, a great multitude of invented languages with little or no similarity, a vast number of invented religions with little, if anything, in common. Even the sciences invented and exploited by evolutionists, the Mendelian Inheritance Law and Biometry, ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... so universal that even the beasts understand it and cock applauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while the magazine writers now address the million, the composers and singers and players make their bows to the billion. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... careful estimates of the direct cost of the war to nations and individuals. During the first and cheapest year, according to Mr. Rossiter, the total cost of the war, not including the economic value of the lives lost, rose to forty billion dollars. That is equal to all the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... where the bed rock was scraped yielded nearly ten thousand dollars, and one claim which was supposed to have been worked out, and was abandoned, was again taken up by two men who obtained forty thousand dollars from it in two weeks. Up to the present time it is estimated that very nearly two billion dollars' worth of gold have been taken out ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... and the crest of the Vosges Mountains was established as its boundary. The Germans exacted, further, an enormous indemnity for the unjustifiable attack which the French had made upon them. This was fixed at five billion francs, and German troops were to occupy France till it was paid. The French people made pathetic sacrifices to hasten the payment of this indemnity, in order that the country might be freed from the presence of the hated Germans. The ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... endures, the shortest term being ten million years. A good life secures an elevated and happy life on earth, or as a blessed spirit in one of the many heavens, where existence is continued for a bagatelle of ten billion years. When ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic

... Weather Man answered. "I should say that weather warnings issued by the Bureau save half a billion dollars to the country every year and prevent the loss of hundreds of lives. All those are short-range predictions. Very few of them cover much more than a week in advance, except, perhaps, a West Indian Hurricane which has been reported ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... Williams Streets, the banking capital of New York has increased more than sixtyfold, of which more than one-half is held and used in and around Wall Street, and the aggregation of deposited and loanable capital has grown from a few millions to over half a billion. If this has been the result during one century, what will take place in the same direction during the next century? The ratio of increase will not be kept up. A thousand dollars may be doubled in a day, but no such ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... sumptuous palaces which the George conspiracy for the further enrichment if Dives and the starvation of Lazaras would exempt from taxation. The total wealth of this nation is not far from 75 billions, while all the land, exclusive of improvements, would not sell for more than 20 billion. The naked land of our 5 million farms is estimated at about 10 billion, so that leaves but about 10 billion for urban lands—less than one-seventh of the total value. I have no reliable statistics at hand showing what proportion of urban inhabitants own their homes; but ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... stars that roll like one, Right across to God knows where, and you just huddled under Like a little beetle with no business of his own, There you'd hear—like growing grass—a funny silent sound, sir, Mixed with curious crackles in a steady undertone, Just the sound of twenty billion stars a-going round, sir, Yus, and you beneath 'em like a wise old ant, alone, Ant upon a stone, Waving of his antlers, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... economic progress of Russia." Soon afterwards it became known that Alphonse de Rothschild, the head of the great financial firm in Paris, refused to take a hand in floating the Russian loan of half a billion. This first protest of the financial king against the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Government produced a sensation, and it was intensified by the fact that it was uttered in France at a time when the diplomats of both countries were preparing to celebrate the Franco-Russian ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... planets which had been sheltered under a mighty dome resting on the hill-tops—has turned out to occupy a span of space some 16,000,000,000 miles in diameter. That is a very small area in the new universe. Draw a circle, 100 billion miles in diameter, round the sun, and you will find that it contains only three stars besides the sun. In other words, a sphere of space measuring 300 billion miles in circumference—we will not venture upon the number of cubic miles—contains only four stars ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... like the door in Lord Dunsaney's play, opens on to the vastness of the stars. What is it that baffles us and remains undefined and undefinable? Just this: TAO: the Infinite Nature. You can survey the earth, and measure it with chains; but not Space, in which a billion leagues is nowise different from an inch or two, —it bears the same ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... exposure as a consequence of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the Russian bond default in August 1998. After crafting a fiscal adjustment program and pledging progress on structural reform, Brazil received a $41.5 billion IMF-led international support program in November 1998. In January 1999, the Brazilian Central Bank announced that the real would no longer be pegged to the US dollar. This devaluation helped moderate the downturn in economic growth in 1999 that investors ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... millions of arable acres south of the Saskatchewan. North of this river, in the pleasant valleys of the Peace, are one hundred million acres more. If Canada were as thickly populated as the British Isles it would have a billion people. The mind reels and the imagination staggers in thinking of the future of this rich land. God has intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... was still grinning triumphantly. "I said: We are approaching turnover, and, according to my figures, nine days of acceleration at one standard gee will give us a velocity of seventeen million, five hundred and fifty miles per hour, and we have covered a distance of nearly two billion miles." Then he added: "That is, if I remembered my ...
— Hanging by a Thread • Gordon Randall Garrett

... ago this had been a billion and a half years before my birth. 1,500,000,000 B. C. A fluid Earth; a cauldron of molten star-dust and flaming gases: it had been that, just a few moments ago. The core was cooling, so that now a viscous surface was here ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... and persuasive pleas - I tire, I tire of these; But I, the Maker of a billion suns, Ask men to stop the blasphemy of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... Billion Blignaut Bisseux Delporte Du prez Du Toit De la Bey Durand Davel De Langue Duvenage Fourie Fouche Grove Hugo Jourdan Lombard Le Roux Roux Lagrange Labuscaque Mare Marais Malan Malraison Maynard Malherbe ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... rat holes in the port. Like as not that youngster would have had his brains kicked out in a brawl, or been fried to a crisp when some drunk got wild with a blaster, before the year was out. He'd done him a real kindness, given him a chance at a future less than one man in a billion ever had the power to even dream about. Why, if Vye Lansor had known what was going to happen to him, he would have been so willing to volunteer, that he would have dragged Hume here. There was no reason to have any regrets over the boy, ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton

... is almost nonexistent. I suppose there will always be a few congenital criminal types, easily recognizable as such. But I'm told they don't amount to more than ten or twelve individuals a year out of a population of nearly two billion." He smiled broadly. "My chances of ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... now showed by unmistakable signs that a terrible conflict was about to take place, and when the two armies—which the Hindus claim numbered several billion men—came face to face, Krishna delayed the fight long enough to recite with Arjuna a dialogue of eighteen cantos called the Bhagavad-gita, or Divine Song, which contains a complete system ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... thing to cause such a fury. A mere twenty Earth pounds of an indifferent grade of rock and a little iron, an irregular, ungraceful lump, spawned somewhere a billion years before as a star died. But it still had most of the awesome velocity and inertia of ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor

... The market for chickens and eggs in the United States would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!). It is solemnly recorded that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... be to destroy all the work we have put into him. His circuits would tend to exceed optimum randomity, and that would mean, in human terms, that he would be insane—and therefore worthless. As a machine, Snookums is worth eighteen billion dollars. The information we have given him, plus the deductions and computations he has made from that information, is worth...." He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows? How can a price ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... and tossed A billion gems across the sea. "The Slave of God is lost, is lost, The Slave of God ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson

... in Blodgett and Blatherwick's notes about Estelle. "A whole directory of names," as Judge Blodgett had said, but no Estelle. The world full of useless people—a billion and a half of them—and not an Estelle at poor Amidon's call in this time of need. Hence this long hiatus ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... Tommy said, as he laid down a great armful of dry wood, "some one ought to invent some kind of a contraption to kill these flying pests off by the billion. Here it is almost cold enough to snow, and we're ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... logs must go down Coldriver Valley to reach a market, Scattergood's maps showed him there were probably a quarter of a million acres—mostly spruce. Estimating with rigid conservatism, this would run eight thousand feet to the acre, or twenty billion feet of timber—and this did not take into consideration hardwood. In Scattergood's secret heart he wanted it all. All he might not be able to get, but he must have more than half—and that ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland

... United States one-fourth her native population.[4] During the last ten years she has drawn back to her home acres not only many of her expatriated native born but almost two million Americans. In ten years her population has almost doubled. Uncle Sam has boasted his four billion yearly foreign trade from Atlantic ports. Canada with a population only one-twelfth Uncle Sam's to-day has a foreign trade ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... effected by the news. 11. Sabbath observation was then very strict. 12. They expect that she wrote the letter. 13. The invention of electricity has revolutionized all manufactures. 14. Who learned her to sing? 15. Edison discovered the phonograph. 16. One cannot comprehend the enormity of a billion of dollars. 17. Many complements were paid to her beauty. 18. His consciousness pricked him. 19. How could any one be guilty of such a cruel action. 20. The advancement of the ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood

... his terms of peace. France was condemned to pay an indemnity of 5,000,000,000 francs (nearly one billion dollars) and certain parts of France were to be occupied by the German troops until this money was fully paid. Two counties of France, Alsace and Lorraine, were to be annexed to Germany. Alsace was inhabited largely by people of German descent, but there were many French ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet

... tee-totum dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There were mountains and seas in a morsel of wet mud, picturesque enough for microscopic tourists. A billion billion morsels of wet mud were no more imposing than one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy—they were all in the splashes of mud from a passing carriage. Everywhere one law and one futility. The human race? Strange marine ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... approximately two hundred thousand machines was worth two hundred and twenty-five millions. Behind them is a stalwart business representing, with parts and accessory makers, an investment of more than a billion and a quarter of dollars. Four hundred thousand men, or more than five times the strength of our standing army, depend upon it for a livelihood, and more than five millions of people are touched or affected ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... interruption, for three hours, at the rate we have mentioned, of one mile in a minute. This will give us a line one hundred and eighty miles long by one broad, and covering one hundred and eighty square miles. Now, allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have one billion, one hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock. As every pigeon consumes fully half a pint of food a day, the quantity required to feed such a flock for one day must be eight million, seven hundred and ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen

... simple and ultimate, then evolution is as fortuitous as a sand-storm, or more so. All prior to force and atoms is "behind the veil." "The material universe is composed of ether, matter, and energy." [58] Ether is a billion times more elastic than air, "almost infinitely rare," [59] its oscillations must be at least seven hundred billions per second, "it exerts no gravitating or retarding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to confess some uncertainty ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... conflict. Personal ambition, trade rivalries, the greed of munition-makers, race hatreds and revenge—all played a part in the awful tragedy. Thirty millions of human lives were sacrificed; three hundred billion dollars' worth of property was destroyed; more than two hundred billion dollars of indebtedness was added to the burden that the world was already carrying. The paper currency of the nations was swollen from seven billions to fifty-six ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... fell down because th' foundations was weak, because th' wind blew, because th' beautiful figure iv th' goolden angel on top iv it was fifteen feet high. It will be rebuilt or maybe not. Th' king iv Italy has given thirty-three billion liars to put it up again, an' siv'ral ladin' American archytects have offered to do th' job, makin' an office buildin' iv it. Th' campinily was wan iv th' proudest monymints iv Italy an' was used as a bell-tower at times, an' at other times as a gazabo where anny American ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... first thing every new party did when they got in was to start up the Bureau of Printin' 'nd Engravin' and roll off a few billion dollars of gover'ment money. In Guadalquique the money for all parties was the same, except each party used to rubber-stamp its name across the face. An old navy yeoman hit the beach there one time named Tommie Anderson and he was made chief of the Bureau o' Printin' ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... Furnaces and steam plants took heating below stairs; electricity replaced candles, lamps, and gas fixtures; and the old cook stove gave way to modern ranges of various sorts. The safer and easier the devices, the more human vigilance relaxed. Today, of our half billion dollar fire loss annually, one-fifth of it occurs in the country, and over sixty per cent of residential fires start ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... natural advantages of the South, the superiority of free to slave labor, the immense immigration, especially from Europe to the South, aided by the Homestead bill, and the conversion of large plantations into small farms, an addition of at least one billion of dollars would be made, by the exclusion of slavery, to the value of the products of the South, in the ten years from 1870 to 1880, which sum is more than double our public debt ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... puzzle-maker. "I knew that. I show you some more. Simple addition. Write in Roman numerals one billion, seven hundred and forty-two million, nine hundred and eighty-three thousand, four hundred ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... the telephone—that is, he made it work perfectly and brought it to the greatest commercial value, so that a billion men, women and children are using it in nearly all the languages and dialects in the civilized world. But he was very careful to give Dr. Alexander Graham Bell credit for his original work on ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... Gradually it has spread, bringing such enormous profits in all our lines of business supplying the needs of the "Great War," that the first twelve months of it showed more than a billion dollars trade balance in our favor, and that balance then began increasing on a progressive scale. Money is yet plentiful. All business is stimulated. Our crops are unexampled in quantity and money value. Everything points to great prosperity unchecked ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar

... all set to pack out in the morning when it happened. Maybe you read about the thing at the time. It got a light-hearted play in the papers, the way those things do. "A one in a billion ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart

... the Air Force be pouring hundreds of millions if not eventually billions of dollars into equipping forty year old B-52s with conventional missiles, or would the Army be maintaining heavy divisions at a personal cost of $60 billion for 35 years of ownership? Why not build a Division force equivalent using technology and doctrine to provide a "heavy division equivalent" force using far fewer troops featuring speed, shock, precision fire while ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade

... a lone optimist, "Hamilton Burton recognizes no conventions of finance; he heeds no laws. He's the most brilliant brigand in the Street—and every hand is against him. He's always just one jump behind a billion dollars—but also he may find himself just one jump ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... have seen it in specimens of old Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments. How strange that decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce these beautiful effects! The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so that it would vanish, like a ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... two billion rounds," Antonov told him. "I will give you an order." He felt in his pockets. "Has any ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed

... happen ag'in in a billion years! Nell's right hand shakes a trifle—she's only a child, mind, an' ain't got the nerves that goes with case-hardened sports—as she shoves the ten-spot forth. But it's comin' her way; her luck holds; as certain ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis

... practically always in an advanced stage of putrefaction. Ordinary fresh, dried or salted meats contain from three million to ten times that number of bacteria per ounce, and such meats as Hamburger steak often contain more than a billion putrefactive organisms to the ounce. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... he commanded, huskily. "It's all right. You'll make good. I know that. And there's a chance in a billion that you'll come back to us. I'm—I'm not deserting you. And I guess there's precious little danger that any one on The Place will ever forget you. It's—it's all right. Millions of humans are doing it. I'd give everything I've got, if I could go, ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune

... 1864, the debt of the country was two billion dollars and twenty cents. Two dollars and ninety cents in greenbacks would buy ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... responded violently. As there were sounds audible and inaudible, so there were lights visible and invisible. The imperfection of our eye as a detector of ether vibrations was, however, far more serious. The eye could detect ether vibrations lying within a single octave—between 400 to 800 billion vibrations per second. Comparatively slow vibrations of ether did not affect our eye and the disturbances they give rise to well-known as electric waves. The electric waves, predicted by Maxwell, were discovered by ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... every gentle wave that broke was a lamp of loveliness. The wake of the Morning Star was a milky path lit with trembling fragments of brilliancy, and below the surface, beside the rudder, was a strip of green light from which a billion sparks of fire shot to the air. Far behind, until the horizon closed upon the ocean, our wake was curiously remindful of the boulevard of a great city seen through a mist, the lights fading in the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... Passenger Pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. Population estimates ranged up to 5 billion, comprising 40% of the total number of birds in North America in the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... can come all the way from Missoula to Broadway in one year and win a world's series game is of course entitled to much credit, but this boy certainly fell into a particularly soft spot. With the Macks' billion dollar infield killing base hits for him and the attack getting him eight runs, he would have had a hard time slipping the game to McGraw if he had sold out before hostilities started. Bush permitted the ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller

... the dark, the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was everywhere—among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine thinly between ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... haemoglobin which they contain combines in the lungs with the oxygen in the inspired air, and they give up this indispensable substance to the cells everywhere in the body. There are also eight thousand leucocytes or colorless cells in a cubic millimeter of blood, this giving a total number of four billion in the average adult, and these vary in character and in relative numbers (Fig. 12). The most numerous of these are round and slightly larger than the red cells; they have a nucleus of peculiar shape and contain granules of a definite character. These ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... rigidity can be deduced. In the case of a solution containing 1/2 per cent. of gelatine, it is found that this rigidity, enormous compared with that of water, is still, however, one trillion eight hundred and forty billion times ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... up with Orivie and the horse, and my muscles so rejoiced at the change of motion in descent that almost involuntarily I took a few steps of a jig and uttered the first verses of "I Only Had Fifty Cents." Mosses and ferns by the billion covered every foot of the small plateau. There were no trees. The trail was a foot deep in water, like an irrigation ditch. One still might easily break one's neck. And I reflected that Pere Olivier ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... this was my country—felt that queer little tickling tingle that locates your spine for you. I'm sure there's no ennui here. Some one said the other day, "Ennui is a disease that comes from living on other people's money." I said no, that I'd often had as fine an attack as if I'd been left a billion, that ennui is when you don't know what to do next and wouldn't do it if you did. Well, here they always do know what to do next, and as one of them told me, "We always get up early the day ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... Ghost of the Hohenzollern, who ate up her two babies when she found they disturbed her gentleman friend, hovering over the scene like Schumann-Heink in the Rheingold,—I would not release that reel for less than a billion dollars down! ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... these coils are strong enough to process all the protons so that their axis of spin is brought into alignment. At this point, the plastic could be thought of as representing a few billion tiny gyroscopes all ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... the time a matter-duplicator receiver misread OCH{3}CH{3}OH, to turn out a magnificently busted blonde sphygmomano-raiser with an HOCH{3}OH replacement, putting a strain on the loyalty of a billion teen-age girls dedicated to Doyle Oglevie worship. Doyle-she insisted she was Doyle-he, as it took quite a while for her hormones to overcome the memory of his easy, eyelash-flapping, tone-torturing microphone conquests. Put a strain ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban

... help finding people? Could a billion and a half human beings die, all at once, without leaving a single isolated group somewhere ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... at this camp was purely preliminary—we certainly formed fours seven billion times, and turned to the right fourteen billion, and saluted a post that represented an officer so often, that the rush of air caused by the quick movement of hands and heads had worn the edge ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... Observer, stated that we had sent back to the United States practically the whole of our holdings of American securities to be sold or pledged as collateral for loans, and that the value of them was three billion dollars—L600 millions sterling. Any of them that have only been pledged can presumably be used to meet the loans raised as they fall due, and so will lighten our burden in the matter of repayment. These loans raised ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... million dollars' worth of diamonds have been found there; and we'll say arbitrarily that all the other diamond fields of the world, including Brazil and Australia, have produced another five hundred million dollars' worth —in other words, since about 1868 a billion dollars' worth of diamonds has been placed upon the market. Gentlemen, that represents millions and millions of carats—forty, fifty, sixty million carats in the rough, say. Please bear those ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle

... out, you would soon recognize the symptoms. An idea strikes him; he becomes abstracted, reads a great deal, pull down books, fills pages of particularly ruled copy paper with figures from a big, round, black pencil until you might think he was calculating the expenditures of a Billion Dollar Congress. He is not a mathematician but, like Balzac, simply dotes on figures. Then comes the analytical stage and that he performs on foot, walking, head bent forward, upstairs, downstairs, outdoors, around the block, in again, through the clattering press room and up and down the hall. ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... Loan from England"—That is the heading under which were grouped the nine lectures given by Miss Helen Fraser at Vassar College. England has borrowed a billion or so of dollars from us, but the obligation is not all her way. The moral strength of our cause is immeasurably increased by her alliance, and the spectacle of a great democracy organizing itself for complete unity ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser

... things are explained in some other volume than the one which fell to me. Possibly they are inexplicable. We can dogmatize about a star a billion miles away, but we cannot say with certainty how an idea came to a man or a song to a bird. Indeed, I think, perhaps, it would have been wiser of me to have left the chiff-chaff out of it altogether. I have an uneasy feeling that all last year ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne

... He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... erected the shrine of my household gods in the beautiful town, which lies in its shadow and is held in its paw. Even now is the Sphinx weaving on the web of my destiny. I hope I may be spared the cumbersome burden of the wealth of a Rockefeller, who is said to possess a billion dollars for every hair on his head. One thousandth part of his wealth would suffice ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann

... miles. It killed about fourteen hundred people and destroyed many millions of dollars worth of timber and other property. A big forest fire in Michigan laid waste a tract forty miles wide and one hundred and eighty miles long. More than four billion feet of lumber, worth $10,000,000, was destroyed and several hundred people lost their lives. In recent years, a destructive forest fire in Minnesota caused a loss of $25,000,000 worth of ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack

... fertile in all France, the farming capital amounts at the least to five hundred francs per hectare, not counting the value of the buildings and of the land itself. For a total of two million hectares, the sum thus represented in the personal advances of farmers reach or surpass a billion, for in French Flanders and in Artois this minimum estimate of five hundred francs ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... really want anything, Philip, but just to sit here a moment and rest. I had no idea coming out was so tiresome! I believe I've said, 'oh, thank you!' a billion times!" ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells

... gravely. "After the Lord printed one volume, he destroyed the plates. Mr. Parker, sir—" He stepped up to John Parker and smote the latter lightly on the breast—"Tag; you're it!" he announced pleasantly. "I'll cancel this contract when you hand me a certified check; for twenty-four billion, nine-hundred and eighty-two million, four hundred and seventeen thousand, six hundred and one dollars, nine cents, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... dome of heaven was punctuated by a billion dots of steely white that looked like pin-pricks. All the light there was came from the fitful watch-fires, where even the wagons were being burned now that the meagre supply of rough timber was giving out. The rebels, too, were burning everything on which they could ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... "if I broke a tube of that stuff in the corner of a ten-thousand-acre field the whole field would be rotten in twenty-four hours! It spreads from stalk to stalk with a rapidity that is amazing. One germ multiplies itself in a living cornfield a billion times in twelve hours. It would not only be possible, but certain that twenty of van Heerden's agents in America could destroy the harvests of the United States in ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... she remained motionless like a stone, suspending her life-breath. Thence going to the top of Himavat, where the gods had performed their sacrifice (in days of yore), that amiable and auspicious girl remained for a billion of years standing on the toe only of her feet. Wending then to Pushkara, and Gokarna, and Naimisha, and Malaya, she emaciated her body, practising austerities agreeable to her heart. Without acknowledging any other god, with steady ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... wonderful!" exclaimed Abdul, with delight radiating over his countenance. "Who would have thought that before the war! Forty billion dollars! Aren't we the financiers! Aren't we the bulwark of monetary power! Can you touch ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... business for a so-called American to be in!" said the head Secret Service man to Brown and Martell sternly. "I wouldn't be in your shoes for a billion dollars." ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield

... on Earth, percentagewise. Of the three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand total of some ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)

... painted: one could tell her pictures mid a billion, So daubed were they with ochre blots and splashes of vermilion; She claimed to be a connoisseur of objets d'art and curios, But what attracted notice was her openwork and lury hose, Fashioned in every colour from magenta down to cinnabar, Suggestive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various

... down below infra-red," continued Cor. "You have seen our development of the heat-dynamo principle. It utilizes, I might add, not only solar radiation but that of the stars as well. There being a billion and a half of these in the universe, many of them a thousand times or more as large as your own sun, we naturally have quite an efficient little heating plant here. It provides us with our weapon of warfare, as well as keeping us warm. Permit me ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... to calculate the number of millions he would be worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett, visiting ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountains from me, well may ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... and the Geary Law. Immigration Restriction. Thomas B. Reed Institutes Parliamentary Innovations in the House of Representatives. Counting a Quorum. The "Force Bill" in Congress. Resentment of the South. Defeated in Senate. The "Billion Dollar Congress" and the Dependent Pensions Act. Pension Payments. The McKinley Tariff Act and "Blaine" Reciprocity. International Copyright Act Becomes a Law. Mr. Blaine as Secretary of State. Murder by "Mafia" Italians ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... summer of 1916. Every woman of every class (with a few notable exceptions seen for the most part in the Ritz Hotel) was working at something or other: either in self-support, to relieve distress, or to supplement the efforts and expenditures of the Government (two billion francs a month); and it seemed that I never should see the last of those relief organizations of infinite ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... "Well, a billion of dollars is a lot," Tom admitted. "And when you think of all that have been sunk, say even in the last hundred years, it amazes one. But still, all the gold and silver was hidden in the earth before it was dug out, and now it's only gone back ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton

... to the world of fact, and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority belief, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... is inverted, and they must be approaching him and may some day crash along his surface. The inner moon is now about 4,000 miles away, and revolves in 7-1/2 hours. It appears to be about 20 miles in diameter, and weighs therefore, if composed of rock, 40 billion tons. Mars rotates ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... fair god whom the Carian water-nymph loved not wisely but too well. For, albeit the children of an ancient union, they marry not, nor are given in marriage, yet withal multiply exceedingly, so that one (not two) may in a single season produce a billion. And at last when autumn comes, won back from the cold god to his hot mother, they know love and wedlock, and die like all married things. These are the Aphides—sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... overcast at about 18,000 feet. No meteor cruises along straight and level below 18,000 feet. Second, on only rare occasions have meteors been seen traveling three in trail. The chances of seeing such a phenomenon are well over one in a billion. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... essence of one's Being, cannot be thus changed at will. But come, suppose that I had the power of passing through solid things, so that I could penetrate my subjects, one after another, even to the number of a billion, verifying the size and distance of each by the sense of FEELING: how much time and energy would be wasted in this clumsy and inaccurate method! Whereas now, in one moment of audition, I take as it were the census and statistics, local, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott

... the Union, and bring the war much sooner to a close, thus saving a monthly expenditure, far exceeding the whole appropriation. But this vast increase of the wealth of Missouri, caused by her becoming a free State, if far less than one billion of dollars, would, by increasing her contribution to the national revenue, in augmented payments of duties and internal taxes, diminish to that extent the rate of taxation to be paid ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... perfect. Science finds t'e bacillus of t'e perfect vine and puts it in t'e cask of fresh grape juice, and soon t'e vine drinkers of t'e vorld svear it is t'e rare old vintage. T'e bacillus, inconceivably tiny, svarming vit' life, reproducing itself a billion from one, t'at is Nature's tool. And t'e physiologist ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... fixed the price at $2.20. This has been high enough to encourage the farmer to increase his crop and not too high to be fair to the consumer. The Department of Agriculture, during the winter of 1917-18, had for its slogan, "a billion-bushel crop for 1918." It has worked intensively to help the farmer in selecting and testing seed and in fighting destructive insects and plant-diseases, and in every way to help ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker

... 1918, three months before the armistice, was an American squadron equipped with American planes. The Allies had looked to America for the production of combat planes in quantity and Congress, responding to popular enthusiasm, had in the first days of the war appropriated more than half a billion dollars for their manufacture. An Aircraft Production Board was organized, with Howard E. Coffin as chairman, although the actual manufacture of the machines was under the supervision of the Signal Corps. Promises were ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... Parliament voted war credits amounting to twenty billions of dollars. Of this enormous fund only two billions have been borrowed from outside sources; all the remainder has been subscribed or paid for by taxation or by loans in France herself. More than a billion dollars has been loaned to her Allies ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... forced upon us by Congress. It is the law of redundancy and depreciation. If this policy is adopted by Congress, an enlarged issue made of treasury notes, and the plan of the Secretary discarded, our bank and treasury note circulation, with the war continued, will very largely exceed one billion of dollars before the close of the next fiscal year, and both will be depreciated much more than sixty per cent. Thus, if we should enlarge our issues of legal demand treasury notes to $500,000,000, and these be made the basis of bank issues, in the ratio of three to one, our total paper circulation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... more than one million tons. If this were all made up into the refreshing drink we get at our breakfast tables, there would be enough to supply every inhabitant of the earth with some sixty cups a year, representing a total of more than ninety billion cups. In terms of pounds the annual world output amounts to about two and a quarter billions—an amount so large that if it were done up in the familiar one-pound paper packages; and if these packages were laid end to end in a row; they would form a line long enough to reach to the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... slowly to his feet and went toward the door, slipping on his coat and cap. "I'm going to whistle for Baree," he said, and went out. The white world was brilliant under the glow of a full moon and a billion stars. It was the most wonderful night he had ever seen, and yet for a few moments he was as oblivious of its amazing beauty, its almost startling vividness, as though he had ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... out there were about four million French families who owned their homes and a thriftier and more industrious people could hardly be found. In 1871, when the heartless Bismarck insisted on having a one billion dollar indemnity, besides the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, he thought he had the people of France throttled for a generation, but to his very great amazement every dollar of this huge sum was paid in less than three years. This fact is but ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... unlimited issue; according to the Jacobin financiers, nothing more is necessary to provide for the war than to turn the wheel and grind out promises to pay: in June, 1793, assignats to the amount of four billion three hundred and twenty millions have already been manufactured, and everybody sees that the mill must grind faster. This is why the guarantee, vainly increased, no longer suffices for the monstrous, disproportionate ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... be heads. So if '17' had come up five times to-night, it would be just as likely to come the sixth as if the previous five had not occurred, and that despite the fact that before it had appeared at all odds against a run of the same number six times in succession are about two billion, four hundred and ninety-six million, and some thousands. Most systems are based on the old persistent belief that occurrences of chance are affected in some way by occurrences immediately preceding, but disconnected physically. ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... that there are a billion people in these two-thirds. But that figure is so big as only to stagger the mind in an attempt to take it in. The important thing is to see that it doesn't by its sheer bigness, stagger our faith or our courage or our praying ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon

... in the power of corporations produced by modern industrial conditions, it would be necessary to increase in like fashion the activity of the sovereign power which alone could control such corporations. As has been aptly said, the only way to meet a billion-dollar corporation is by invoking the protection of a hundred-billion-dollar government; in other words, of the National Government, for no State Government is strong enough both to do justice to corporations and to exact justice ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab—his body's ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... War, where he jokingly said he "bled, died, and came away," although he never had a skirmish nor saw an Indian, he had risen to the chief command in a war that numbered three thousand battles and skirmishes and cost three billion dollars. Having no ancestry himself, being able to trace his line by rumor and tradition only as far back as his grandfather, he became, like George Washington, the Father of his Country. Born of a father who could not write his name, he himself had written the Proclamation of Emancipation, the ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... comprises two billions two hundred and fifty millions of cubic miles, forming a spherical body of a diameter of sixty leagues, the weight of which would be three quintillions of tons. To comprehend the meaning of these figures, it is necessary to observe that a quintillion is to a billion as a billion is to unity; in other words, there are as many billions in a quintillion as there are units in a billion. This mass of fluid is equal to about the quantity of water which would be discharged by all the rivers of the earth in forty ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... help him but a hired man and a high protective terriff. The farms in our State is mortgaged for over seven hundred million dollars. Ten of our Western States—I see by the papers—has got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with the town clerks on farm machinery, stock, waggins, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... have more people. Let me see, we have seven here. Can you get some more, Mona? We won't play till after luncheon. It will take the rest of the morning for me to finish making up the game. We'll play on the west lawn. Oh, it's going to be lovely! I want four billion yards of red ribbon and cosy decorations and a lot of things! Skip to the telephone, Mona, and invite enough people to make twenty of us all together. Tell 'em to come at three o'clock, ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells

... the range of his thought or imagination one tithe of the years, divine or human, which are included in this marvellous chronology. A billion years are but as a ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... as a causal system of physical and psychological processes, which lies spread out in time between the dates of my birth and of my death, will come to an end with my last breath; to continue it, to make it go on till the earth falls into the sun, or a billion times longer, would be without any value, as that kind of life which is nothing but the mechanical occurrence of physiological and psychological phenomena had as such no ultimate value for me or for you, or for anyone, at any time. But my real ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... to grudge them the very dust she had lent them during their wretched pilgrimage. The busy, toiling, rushing, roaring, groaning universe, big with young, appeared to cry out: "Away with them! Away with them! They have had their hour! They have performed their task. Here are a billion spirits waiting for the substance we loaned them. The spirits are boundless in number; matter is scarce. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... there is such an annual increment to the wealth of each country taken as a whole. Some experts have told me they calculated that, at the outside, in prosperous peace times the annual increment of German wealth is ten billion marks. ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard

... damn fools who come out two billion miles to scratch rock, as if there weren't enough already on the inner planets. He's got a rich platinum property. Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell

... for my two billion dollars," the imp retorted, and winked at her. As did Nick, Cletus could plainly see the twist operated on the MVD payroll as well as in ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt

... known to or analysable by organic chemistry; and if these complex molecules likewise possess the adhesive faculty, a grouping of millions or even billions of atoms may ultimately be formed. (A billion, that is a million millions, of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... thick forefinger. "Type M sun. Three planets, intelligent (AA3C) human-type life on second. Oxygen-breathers. Non-mechanical. Religious. Friendly. Unique social structure, described in Galactic Survey Report 33877242. Population estimate: stable at three billion. Basic Cascellan vocabulary taped under Cas33b2. Scheduled for resurvey 2375 A.D. Cache of transformer fuel left, beam coordinate 8741 kgl. ...
— Warrior Race • Robert Sheckley

... had been broken down or eroded centuries ago. A dam was built in 1875, and later raised eleven feet higher so as to afford more storage capacity. The area of the lake is now about 600 acres (before the heightening of the dam it was 300 acres), and its storage capacity is about two billion gallons. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... fallout from the 500-plus megatons of nuclear testing through 1970 will produce between 2 and 25 cases of genetic disease per million live births in the next generation. This means that between 3 and 50 persons per billion births in the post-testing generation will have genetic damage for each megaton of nuclear yield exploded. With similar uncertainty, it is possible to estimate that the induction of cancers would range from 75 to 300 cases per ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

... national debt, bearing interest at five per cent, with the understanding that if more paper were afterward needed more would be issued. All in vain. The official tables of depreciation show that the assignats continued to fall. A forced loan, calling in a billion of these, checked this fall, but only for a moment. The "interconvertibility scheme" between currency and bonds failed as dismally as the "interconvertibility scheme" between currency and land had ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White

... House the road soon traverses the famous mineral belt of the Comstock Lode. This belt is 7,000 feet wide and 6 miles long, and produced nearly a billion dollars. The first mine to be seen is the Haywood, lying to the west side of the road. This mine produced over $1,000,000 and is ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy. Religion, which ought to be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the same grade. You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?" The modern version would be, "How came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... facts concerning the production of motor vehicles will give an idea of the immensity of America's manufacturing program. The automobile industry as a whole expended one billion three hundred million dollars in order to expand its factories to fill government orders. By the month of October, 1918, 70,000 motor trucks had been sent overseas. At the end of the war, 5-ton and 10-ton trucks were being built ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... the American system of competitive enterprise was the creation of the Small Business Administration in 1953 to assist existing small businesses and encourage new ones. This agency has approved over $1 billion in loans, initiated a new program to provide long-term capital for small businesses, aided in setting aside $31/2 billion in government contracts for award to small business concerns, and brought to the attention of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... he said, as he stood with her, catching her by the wrist at the brink. "Down in this hole, right before us, there's more than a million grayling—there's four hundred billion of them right down in there, and every one of them is eight feet long! Sim Gage was right—I'll bet some of them do weigh three pounds. It must be right in the height of the summer ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough

... ov show Tew talk ov chast'ning trials; When thet thar thunder cloud lets down It's sixty billion vials; No! when it looks tew rain on hay, First take yer rake an' then ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... free world's future. From the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the South Pacific one third of all mankind has entered upon an historic struggle for a new freedom; freedom from grinding poverty. Across all continents, nearly a billion people seek, sometimes almost in desperation, for the skills and knowledge and assistance by which they may satisfy from their own resources, the material wants common to ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... issues were two—first, the land, which the peasants wanted to take from the landlords; and second, the foreign debt. The Russian Tsar had borrowed four billion dollars from France and a billion or two from England, to be used in enslaving the Russian workers and driving several millions of them to death on the battlefield. Now should the Russian workers consider themselves bound by this debt? When anybody asked Jimmie ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... country have not yet been drained. One tenth of the surface of Ireland is said to be covered with peat, and small bogs abound in the drift-covered area of New England and the states lying as far west as the Missouri River. In Massachusetts alone it has been reckoned that there are fifteen billion cubic feet of peat, the largest ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... institution. The usual argument began with ridicule of Thomas Jefferson's famous statement that all men are born equal. The second argument was an economic one, based on the value of the slaves. Three million slaves would average a value of five hundred dollars each, and this meant a billion five hundred millions of property, that had to be considered as so much property in ships, factories, engines, reapers, pastures, meadows, herds and flocks. All planters invoked the words of Moses, permitting ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... "They got to that one in a hurry," he murmured to himself. Another figure had been returned to the accuracy percentage forecasting figures of the huge computers that dictated the lives and luxuries of more than a half a billion Americans. ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael

... United States"—sent to various persons residing among the Indians a "Comparative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Indian Tribes of the United States," a quarto paper of 25 pages, comprising 350 words, and the numerals one to one billion. The returns from this were for the most part incorporated in his work; a few, however, found their way into the collection ...
— Catalogue Of Linguistic Manuscripts In The Library Of The Bureau Of Ethnology. (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (Pages 553-578)) • James Constantine Pilling

... in nine billion dollars' worth of railways; in two billion dollars' worth of industrial concerns; in one billion dollars' worth of life insurance groups; in one billion dollars' worth of banking groups; in two billion dollars' worth of trust companies. Mind you, I ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London

... method of crossing oceans is adopted, it will of course mean the end of that fantastic medieval anachronism, the Navy. No need for billion-dollar aircraft carriers, battleships, drydocks and all the other cumbersome junk that keeps those boats and things afloat. Give the ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison

... said Fanny. "He can't fight. There's something the matter with his lungs, or something, and they're going to make him quit school. Besides, he's a billion times better than any ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... The corn of the Mississippi valley becomes the pork which, yielded from the carcasses of more than forty million swine, is exported to half the countries of the world. Even the two and one-half billion pounds of wool ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... as she sobbed out: 'Charley, I thank you a thousand times. I never expected so nice a cloak. This seems like other days. You are so good, and I am so happy.'" The drink bill of our Nation for last year was over a billion of dollars, more money than was spent for missions—home and foreign—for all of our Churches, for public education, for all the operations of courts of justice and of public officers, and at least for two of the staple products of use in our country, such as furniture ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy



Words linked to "Billion" :   large indefinite quantity, Britain, trillion, large indefinite amount, 1000000000000, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, U.K., USA, one million million, U.S.A., million, US, United Kingdom, billion-dollar grass, large integer, one thousand million, United States, 1000000000, milliard, gazillion, jillion, the States, U.S., zillion, UK, America, cardinal, Great Britain, United States of America



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