Let us look at the evolution history of "100 million" ( image get from http://www.vividict.com ) -
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Learn one Chinese Character a day - 亿 |
When it came to Bronze Script

When it came to Seal Script








Or maybe we can view it from a different angle to reach the same idea. Kongzi ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius ), the creator of Confucianism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism ), once said that at age of 70, a person (




So Bronze Script


Clerical Script and Regular Script simplified it a bit to become "億". At age of Regular Script, a simplified version of "亿" appeared, as "乙" has the same pronunciation as "意" (意 is right part of 億). People started to borrow "乙" to replace "意" while writing "100 million".
Traditional Chinese uses "億", while Simplified Chinese uses "亿".
Please take note that 人 (亻)is a commonly used Chinese Radical. Same as "心".
Whenever you see a 亻in a Chinese character, that 亻always refers to a person.
Below is a explanation of Chinese Radical from wikipedia.org:
A Chinese radical (Chinese: 部首; pinyin: bùshǒu; literally: "section header") is a graphical component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. This component is often a semantic indicator (that is, an indicator of the meaning of the character), though in some cases the original semantic connection has become obscure owing to changes in character meaning over time. In other cases the radical may be a phonetic component or even an artificially extracted portion of the character.Now we have finished almost all Chinese numbers. Using almost here is because that we have numbers now in trillions. One Chinese character was borrowed to mean "Trillion" recently. But we can leave that alone for now.
Some example numbers:
123,456,789,123 - 一千二百三十四亿五千六百七十八万九千一百二十三。
Let us enjoy a Chinese Calligraphy with "億 | 亿" inside to end today's learning:
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钟声传三千界内, 佛法扬万亿国中 |
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