Indefinite and fictitious numbers

Many languages have words expressing indefinite and fictitious numbers—inexact terms of indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as placeholder names, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. One technical term for such words is "non-numerical vague quantifier".^[1]

General placeholder names

English has many words whose definition includes an indefinite quantity, such as "lots", "many", "several", and "some". These placeholders can and often do have a generally equivalent numeral counterpart, e.g., "a couple" meaning approximately 2 to 3 or "a few" meaning approximately 3 to 6 but typically 4. Other placeholders can quantify items by describing how many fit into something that could change based on size, e.g., "a handful" represents more peanuts than apples. Larger quantities can be described by "half-dozen" (six units), "dozen(s)" (twelve units per dozen), and less commonly "tens", or "scores" (twenty units per score). Still larger quantities are described as hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, etc.

A number of other words and phrases are used to convey the idea in informal or humorous ways, such as slang terms like "metric shitload",^[2] "fuckton",^[3] "gobs of" (e.g. "gobs of jobs" career fair^[4]), "n-something" used especially to indicate someone's age within a decade, e.g. "twentysomething" and similar terms used most often to indicate someone's age within a decade, and phrases like "to the n^th-degree".

Specific numbers used as indefinite

In various Middle Eastern traditions, the number 40 is used to express a large but unspecific number,^[5][6] as in the Hebrew Bible's "forty days and forty nights", the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, the story Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, etc. This usage is sometimes found in English as well.^[7]

In Latin, sescenti (literally 600) was used to mean a very large number, perhaps from the size of a Roman cohort.^[8]

In Arabic, 1001 is used similarly, as in the The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (lit. "a thousand nights and one night").^[6] Many modern English book titles use this convention as well: 1,001 Uses for ....

In Japanese, 八千 means 8000, while for example 八千草 (lit. 8000 herbs) means a variety of herbs and 八千代 ( lit. 8000 generations) means eternity.

The number 10,000 is used to express an even larger approximate number, as in Hebrew רבבה r^ebâbâh,^[9] rendered into Greek as μυριάδες, and to English myriad.^[10] Similar usage is found in the East Asian 萬 or 万 (lit. 10,000), and the South Asian lakh (lit. 100,000).^[11]

Other specific numbers are occasionally used as indefinite as well, such as English dozen and score.^[6]

Umpteen

Umpteen is a term for an unspecified but reasonably large number, used in a humorous fashion or to imply that it is not worth the effort to pin down the actual figure. Despite the -teen ending, which would seem to indicate that it lies between 12 and 20, umpteen can be used in ways implying it is much larger than that—if it ever could be pinned down.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the word is derived from the slang ump(ty), a dash in Morse code (of imitative origin), plus -teen.^[12]

The Oxford English Dictionary reports its use in 1918, and offers the alternative spelling umteen. It agrees that the derivation is from umpty, whose etymology is given as "A fanciful verbal repr. of the dash (—) in Morse code."^[13][14]

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary gives its etymology as a "blend of umpty (such and such) and -teen," but also gives 1918 as the year of its first use.^[15]

-illion

Words with the suffix "-illion", most commonly zillion,^[16] gazillion,^[17] bajillion,^[18] and jillion^[19] and are often used as fictitious names for an unspecified, large number by analogy to names of large numbers such as million, billion and trillion. Their size is dependent upon the context, but can typically be considered large enough to be unfathomable.

These terms are often used as hyperbole or for comic effect, or in loose, unconfined conversation to present an un-guessably large number. Since these are undefined, they have no mathematical validity and no accepted order, since none is necessarily larger or smaller than any of the others.

The "-illion" concept is so well established that it is the basis of a joke, in which a speaker misunderstands the word Brazilian (being from the nation of Brazil) as an enormous number called "brazillion".^[20]

Many similar words are used, such as bazillion,^[21] dillion,^[22] gadzillion,^[23] gagillion,^[24] gajillion,^[25] godzillion,^[26] grillion,^[27] hojillion,^[28] kabillion,^[29] kajillion,^[30] katrillion,^[31] killion,^[22] robillion,^[32] skillion,^[33] squillion,^[16] and umptillion.^[34] Also, the suffix can be replaced with "-illionaire" to describe wealthy people.

These words can be transformed into ordinal numbers or fractions by the usual pattern of appending the suffix -th, e.g., "I asked her for the zillionth time."

Sagan's number

Sagan's number is the number of stars in the observable universe. It is named in honor of Carl Sagan.^[35] This number is reasonably well defined, because it is known what stars are and what the observable universe is, but its value is not known with any certainty. In 2003 it was estimated to be 70 sextillion in short scale (70·10²¹).^[36][37] It is presently estimated to be approximately 300 sextillion.^[38]

Sagan's number is unrelated to the sagan unit or the humorous use of the term "sagan" to denote any large quantity—specifically, any number in the billions, due to Sagan's association with the phrase "billions and billions".^[39][40]

See also

• Googol
• Googolplex
• Hair's breadth
• List of unusual units of measurement
• List of humorous units of measurement
• Power of 10
• Names of large numbers
• Mathematical joke
• Muggeseggele
• Inherently funny word

References