Learn English – Is bachelorette replacing spinster and other synonyms

Is this still the case or has the world aligned itself to the American way?

At least Britain seems to have largely aligned itself that way. Quoting Wikipedia, which has an excellent entry on the topic (Long and short scales):

[In the UK,] "billion" has meant 10⁹ in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.

Before the widespread use of "billion" for 10⁹, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard. The long scale term "milliard", for 10⁹, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, "yard", is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange and bond markets.

I wouldn't say that the world has done so, however, as the list of long-scale countries is rather long. For example, in Finnish the only word we use for 10⁹ is miljardi, while 10¹² is biljoona.

But you could well say that about the English-speaking world which now almost universally uses "billion" for 10⁹, according to that Wikipedia article.

The OED attributes haptic and haptics to translations of a passage in Isaac Barrow's 1683 Lectiones Mathematicae,

Quod si perinde comperta foret undulationis aereae figura, qua sonus efficitur, et audiendi sensus impellitur, inde nova proculdubio pars emergeret Matheses, Acoustices nomine celebranda.

Haptice quoque, et Geustice, et Osphrantice pari jure mererenur in hunc ordinem cooptari; si cujusmodi motibus peraguntur istae sensiones conjectura subodorari possent philosophantes.

The first citation of haptic in the OED is from 1860, in William Whewell's edition, and the first of haptics in an earlier translation published in 1734 by John Kirby:

But neither term saw much light of day, and it is more probably more accurate to say that it was introduced from the world of psychology in the late 19th century, the OED's second suggestion. Specifically, it appears the 1892 Über den Hautsinn by Max Dessoir, coined as a parallel to acoustics and optics:

Ich erlaube mir, hierfür das Wort „Haptik" in Vorschlag zu bringen, das im Anschluss an Optik und Akustik gebildet und von dem Verbum ἁπτομαι abzuleiten ist.

or loosely,

I take the liberty to bring forward the word haptics in proposal, which follows optics and acoustics and is derived from the verb ἁπτομαι.

I imagine Dessoir wanted a term of Greek origin, hence haptics over, say, tactilics. Haptic as an adjective is cited from 1895 onwards, with the first post-Dessoir citation given from Mind 4:407:

In haptic sensations are recognised sensations of simple pleasure, of traction and of impact.

Until the term was applied to touchscreen technology, the psychological term seems to have been the principle use, hence the International Society for Haptics.