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Introduction

Some large numbers have real referents in human experience. Their names are real words, encountered in many contexts. For example, today, Google News shows 78,600 hits on "billion," starting with "Turkey Repays $1.6 Billion In Foreign Debt." It shows 9870 hits on "trillion," and 56 on "quadrillion:" "The US Department of Energy reports that in 2002, the United States economy consumed 97.6 quadrillion btus (quad btus)."

References to names of quantities larger than a quadrillion, however, are rare, and increasingly artificial; they tend to be limited to discussions of names of numbers, or mathematical concepts. For example, the first hit on "quintillion" is about a man who is trying to preserve the Etsako language by codifying it, and "went as far as providing numerals from one to quintillion."

It can be argued that a number such as "trigintillion" has no existence in the physical world. There simply are not a trigintillion of anything.

Nevertheless, large numbers have an intellectual fascination, and naming them is one of the ways in which people try to conceptualize and understand them.

In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes introduced a system in which he called a myriad myriad (10) a "first number" a myriad myriad first numbers as "second numbers) (10), and so on up to "eighth numbers" (10). He concludes that if the entire known universe were filled with sand, the number of grains of sand required would be less than "one thousand myriad myriad eighth numbers."

Since then, many others have engaged in the pursuit of conceptualizing and naming numbers that really have no existence outside of the imagination. Such names, even if found in dictionaries, have a tenuous existence. Just as one can debate whether "floccinaucinihilipilification" is really an English word—it is in the Oxford English Dictionary, but no other—it is questionable how real the word "trigintillion" is. "Trigintillion" is only encountered in definitions, lists of names of large numbers, and "Sand Reckoner"-like discourses on the meaning of very large numbers.

Even in contexts where huge numbers are meaningful—science, astronomy, and engineering—the dictionary names such as "sextillion" are almost never used. Since the 1800s, scientists have used the familiar "scientific notation" in which numbers are expressed as multiples of powers of ten, e.g. 10. When such a number needs to be named, "ten to the forty-fifth" is easier to say, easier to understand, and less ambiguous than "quattuordecillion" (which means something different to American and British audiences—assuming that there are any listeners who understand this number without consulting a dictionary). When a concise name is needed, and when the number represents a measurement, rather than a count, the SI prefixes are used; one says "femtosecond," not "one quadrillionth of a second." In other cases, rather than using names for large numbers, specialized large units are used, such as the astronomer's parsec and light year.

Here we present some names that have been given to large numbers, and the context and authority for the names. Keep in mind, however, that these names are very rarely used, and are more in the nature of curiosities or trivia than genuine working English vocabulary.

The Googol family

Chuquet-ized Numbering

This table contains a list of numbers that extend to very large sums. Note that there is no standard way of naming after centilliard or centillion.

Commercial Product using Yoctillion

See Also

• List of numbers
• Large numbers
• Chuquet
• Pelletier
• Knuth

• v
• t
• e