Indefinite and fictitious large numbers
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Many similar words are used, such as jillion, bajillion ISBN 0380808919. p. 86: "Well, yes, it was, and the rumor that there were seventy bajillion women to every man just wouldn't die...", hojillion#redirect , squillion ISBN 0061020613. [p. 146]: "And you owe me a million billion trillion zillion squillion dollars.", skillion ISBN 0446608483. p. 429: "Sure enough, I found a skillion articles from about a dozen years ago, accounts of the events and aftermath of Cherry Plain.", kabillion ISBN 0395971780. p. 115: "That's about all I remember, except for this salad and the ninety kabillion manicotti someone else brought.", kajillion, kabajillion'#redirect , bagillion#redirect , jabillion#redirect , gajillion [p. 98]: "The expectation was that the Soviets would roll a gajillion of their ever-improving but still basic tanks across the landscape...", fajillion#redirect , skajillion#redirect , optillion#redirect , xellion#redirect , googillion#redirect , fafillion#redirect , umptillion ISBN 0812575431. p. 121: "Your best place, geographically, to bridge across the river is surrounded by Hell's Bells Bog, so deep it would take fifteen umptillion tons of special fill to stabilize it, putting you over your budget.", gagillion ISBN 0312959842. p. 114: "The brochures basically told the same story Stan had given me: Pacific Properties owned a gagillion places that generated a gagillion dollars.", infillion#redirect , gadzillion ISBN 1580085318. p. 3: "...and then the editor asked a gadzillion questions...", manillion#redirect , zoogol#redirect , gazoogol#redirect , godzillion ISBN 031242051X. p. 395: "She believes there's a zillion gallons of oil and a godzillion cubic meters of natural gas inside the earth, beginning at a depth of about four miles, and no anvil-headed senior research chemist with a crew cut and stinky breath is going to tell her it isn't so., grillion ISBN 0786409754. p. 8: "After that, even expansion and grillion-dollar salaries could not harm it.", joogol#redirect , gajoogol#redirect , gozillion#redirect , and jijillion#redirect .
Typically, these words are used in a humorous context, or used, perhaps childishly, in loose, unconfined conversation. The faux number is most commonly used when wishing to present an unguessably large number in a large, whether realistic or not, way. It is often used to impress someone with the concept of an ambiguous numerical enormousness.
These words can be transformed into ordinal numbers or fractions by following the usual pattern of appending the suffix -th: "I asked her for the zillionth time," "the first zillionth of a second after the Big Bang."
Since these are undefined numbers used in a colloquial context, they are not considered to have mathematical validity.
Each of these numbers is by no means considerably larger or smaller than any of the other ambiguous numbers but can be conceived of as such, due to personal preference. Various authors and other persons have set their own definitions as to amount and order of fictional and ambiguous numbers, often related to their experiences with juvenile schoolchildren and their offered explanations.
In times past, product promoters used a similar expression, "A thousand-and-one uses", though, obviously, not implying that there is no 1,002nd use.
In popular culture
- From the television series Futurama, episode 1x06, "A Fishful of Dollars," where Fry is bidding for the last known can of anchovies in existence:
- Fry: "One jillion dollars!" [the crowd gasps]
- Auctioneer: "Sir, that's not a number." [the crowd gasps again]#redirect
References
See also
- Names of large numbers
- Placeholder name
- Kadigans in the English language for numbers
- Umpteen
- Zillion
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