About
The character "亿", representing the number one hundred thousand in ancient usage and now meaning one hundred million, originates from a process of phonetic borrowing applied to its more complex traditional form, "億". This traditional character was itself composed of the semantic component "人" (person) and the phonetic component "意" (meaning, thought), and it initially carried the verbal sense of "to estimate" or "to conceive". Over time, this original meaning became obsolete as the character was increasingly utilized solely for its sound to denote a specific numerical quantity, first "a hundred thousand" and later, to meet the needs of a modernizing economy, the vastly larger "hundred million". Its contemporary simplified form, "亿", retains the person radical but replaces the original phonetic element with the graphically simpler character "乙", which serves a purely phonetic function in this context.
Etymology Hide
Example Sentences Hide
中国人口超过十四亿。
这个项目投资十亿元。
亿万人民庆祝国庆。
全球有七十亿人居住。
公司今年营收达到百亿。
这部电影票房收入过亿。
科学家发现了亿万年前的化石。
为了实现这个目标，我们需要投入数十亿资金。