billion

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for billion is 7 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɪljən/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,811 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for billion, with forms such as "bbillion", "bililon", and "bilion". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 6 confusable-pair relationships, "bullion", "billions", "Billie", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From French billion, equivalent to bi- (“two”) + -illion. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is billion, spelled B-I-L-L-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.