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One motivation for such a pursuit is that attributed to the inventor of the word googol, who was certain that any finite number "had to have a name". Another possible motivation is competition between students in computer programming courses, where a common exercise is that of writing a program to output numbers in the form of English words.
the long scale — designates a system of numeric names formerly used in British English, but now obsolete, in which a billion is used for a million million (and similarly, with trillion, quadrillion etc., the prefix denoting the power of a million); and a thousand million is sometimes called a milliard. This system is still used in several ...
Widespread sounding of the word occurs through the name of the company Google, with the name "Google" being an accidental misspelling of "googol" by the company's founders, [9] which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. [10]
Thus lakh crore is 1 trillion. In the ancient Indian system, still in use in regional languages of India, there are words for (10 62 ). These names respectively starting at 1000 are sahasra , ayuta , laksha , niyuta , koti , arbhudha , abhja , karva , nikarva , mahapadma , shanmkhu , jaladhi , amtya , madhya , paraardha .
Similarly, some are only derived from words for numbers inasmuch as they are word play. (Peta-is word play on penta-, for example. See its etymology for details.) The root language of a numerical prefix need not be related to the root language of the word that it prefixes. Some words comprising numerical prefixes are hybrid words.
Other countries also use a word similar to trillion to mean 10 12, etc. Whilst a few of these countries like English use a word similar to billion to mean 10 9, most like Arabic have kept a traditionally long scale word similar to milliard for 10 9. Some examples of short scale use, and the words used for 10 9 and 10 12, are
Visualization of 1 trillion (short scale) A Rubik's cube, which has about 43 trillion (long scale) possible positions. Trillion is a number with two distinct definitions: 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 10 12 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English.
This list contains selected positive numbers in increasing order, including counts of things, dimensionless quantities and probabilities. Each number is given a name in the short scale , which is used in English-speaking countries, as well as a name in the long scale , which is used in some of the countries that do not have English as their ...