This article lists and discusses the usage and derivation of names of large numbers, together with their possible extensions.
The following table lists those names of large numbers which are found in many English dictionaries and thus have a special claim to being "real words". The "Traditional British" values shown are unused in American English and are becoming rare in British English, but their other language variants are dominant in many non-English-speaking areas, including continental Europe and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America; see Long and short scales.
English also has many words, such as "zillion", used informally to mean large but unspecified amounts; see indefinite and fictitious numbers.
Read more about Names Of Large Numbers: Standard Dictionary Numbers, Usage of Names of Large Numbers, Origins of The "standard Dictionary Numbers", An aide-memoire, The Googol Family, Extensions of The Standard Dictionary Numbers, Proposals For New Naming System, Other Large Numbers Used in Mathematics and Physics
Famous quotes containing the words names of, names, large and/or numbers:
“Tonight there are only the winter stars.
The sky is no longer a junk-shop,
Full of javelins and old fire-balls,
Triangles and the names of girls.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The world is a puzzling place today. All these banks sending us credit cards, with our names on them. Well, we didn’t order any credit cards! We don’t spend what we don’t have. So we just cut them in half and throw them out, just as soon as we open them in the mail. Imagine a bank sending credit cards to two ladies over a hundred years old! What are those folks thinking?”
—Sarah Louise Delany (b. 1889)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)