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Instead of arguing about whether a billion should be the English and European one with twelve noughts (as opposed to the US and other countries' nine noughts) we could simply count the zeroes used.
I mentioned this idea in the Dozens Online Forum recently - I think Fred Ruston (a DSGB member) first suggested it - in reply to a post there on number names.
For *10, 100, 1000, 10 000 etc the names zen, bizen, trizen, etc were mentioned in the post; our member's version, using 'nul' for the zeroes, produced 'onenul, twonul, threenul ... ten-nul, elfnul, zen-nul, zenone-nul' and so on. (The hyphen was required in zen-nul so that it shouldn't sound like (for example) 'fennel' with short e and a schwa.)