Billion. Trillion. What's twenty zero's?

January 5, 2005 9:35 AM

I am looking for the word that describes a the number 9 with twenty zero's after it. I was able to determine that 9 with 18 zero's after it is quintillion and 9 with 21 zero's is sextillion but nothing for 9 with twenty zero's after it.
posted by tirebouchon to Education (22 answers total)

nine hundred quintillion
posted by cadastral at 9:38 AM on January 5, 2005

Nine hundred quintillion.

Numbers which have a string of zeroes at the end, the number of which is not divisible by three, just have the appropriate multiple of ten or one hundred prepended.

9 = nine
90 = ninety
900 = nine hundred
9000 = nine thousand
90000 = ninety thousand
900000 = nine hundred thousand
9000000 = nine million
90000000 = ninety million
900000000 = nine hundred million
...
9000000000000000000 = nine quintillion
90000000000000000000 = ninety quintillion
900000000000000000000 = nine hundred quintillion
9000000000000000000000 = nine sextillion
90000000000000000000000 = ninety sextillion
etc.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 9:38 AM on January 5, 2005 [1 favorite]

It's likely to be a "hundred quintillion", no?

Like, tens, hundreds, thousands; ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions; ten millions, hundred millions, billions; ten billions, hundred billions, trillions; etc., etc.
posted by benzo8 at 9:40 AM on January 5, 2005

(Hmmm... Preview, benzo... Preview.)
posted by benzo8 at 9:41 AM on January 5, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for the lesson Devilsadvocate
posted by tirebouchon at 9:44 AM on January 5, 2005

yeah, only a googol gets a special name in english, but that's basically just for fun. When actual mathematicians are talking about numbers like that, they'll just refer to 10^20.
posted by mdn at 9:50 AM on January 5, 2005

ph33r my pl/sql

SQL> select spell_number(900000000000000000000) bignum from dual;

BIGNUM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NINE HUNDRED QUINTILLION
posted by neilkod at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2005

*credit to tom kyte
posted by neilkod at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2005

SQL> select spell_number(900000000000000000000) bignum from dual;

Ok, now I have a crush on you.
posted by ori at 10:03 AM on January 5, 2005

I'd say that it depends on the audience. Quintillion, although accurate means nothing to most people. nine-times-10-to-the-20th-power would do it for some, and I'd
go for either "nine hundred million billion" for a Sky News UK audience or "nine hundred million million million" for that all important Fox News US Audience. (Billion means different things to the UK and US). If all these fail, then you can't do better than using some improbable measure based on national monuments or the distance to the moon. (The number of Litres of water needed to fill 30 million Olympic sized Stadiums; if stacked as dimes would reach to the moon and back 500 times; etc)
posted by seanyboy at 10:17 AM on January 5, 2005

Here's an image of a cube of One quintillion pennies. You could describe this and say there's 900 of these.
posted by kokogiak at 10:34 AM on January 5, 2005

Don't any of you guys use commas in writing out numbers? Or is that just a British thing? We would write 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 - which also helps to work out the name.

seanyboy - I think it's now accepted usage to say 'billion' for a thousand million on both sides of the pond, though it's true that when I was a boy, a billion was 1,000,000 x 1,000,000.
posted by dash_slot- at 10:37 AM on January 5, 2005

(Billion means different things to the UK and US)

This has always confused me, is there any page that explains how that differance developed?

OK, well, that was mostly answered on preview, but I have still never heard anyone used the word billiard.
posted by milovoo at 10:46 AM on January 5, 2005

XQUZYPHYR : that guy you link to has this at the foot of his page:

Copyright Information: If you use information from a source like this in a report, you should give proper credit, citing the author as a source. In other words, you must acknowledge where you found the information and who supplied it.

Ironically, he doesn't cite a source for his info on the British Numbering System!

I'm not in the scientific world, but in common usage, I'd say he was wrong (sorry, seanyboy!)
posted by dash_slot- at 11:09 AM on January 5, 2005

Ok, now I have a crush on you.

ori, you had me at What is he up to this time?
posted by neilkod at 12:12 PM on January 5, 2005

seanyboy - I think it's now accepted usage to say 'billion' for a thousand million on both sides of the pond,

That's correct. The old definition of billion in the UK is now considered archaic. And, in fact, I've never seen it used.
posted by wackybrit at 1:18 PM on January 5, 2005

Wow. That's news to me. I stand corrected.
Also news to me is the fact that quite a few people think that billiards is played with more than three balls. What sort of a crazy numbering world do we live in.
posted by seanyboy at 2:23 PM on January 5, 2005

Yup, another UKer here. I've never heard billion mean anything other than 10^9.
posted by salmacis at 4:30 PM on January 5, 2005

seanyboy - I think it's now accepted usage to say 'billion' for a thousand million on both sides of the pond, though it's true that when I was a boy, a billion was 1,000,000 x 1,000,000.
posted by dash_slot- at 10:37 AM PST on January 5

This was so surprising to me. I'd never heard this before. I mentioned this at work today after I heard it here, and my boss (raised in Britain and probably in his thirties), said he'd never heard of this either. Although another co-worker who lives in Toronto, and is originally from Argentina said that in Spanish a billion does mean a million million, not a thousand million.
posted by marsha56 at 9:49 PM on January 5, 2005

The "British billion" may still be used in (parts of?) India. Several of the folks at work -- with origins in India -- have mentioned in passing that "billion is a different value there."
posted by majick at 11:34 PM on January 5, 2005

In Dutch, 'biljoen' is also a million million, with 'miljard' being a thousand million. This often leads to inflated numbers in news articles translated from American sources by incompetent translators.
posted by cameleon at 4:31 AM on January 6, 2005

dash - in chile (and i guess other latin places?) a decimal point separates thousands, while a comma is used to separate the integral number from the decimal (except that sometimes a point is used as a decimal point).

i think ms and java both do this with the right i18n settings.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:47 AM on January 6, 2005