Indefinite and fictitious numbers

The English language has a number of words for 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.

General placeholder names

* oodles;
* tons (although a ton is also one of several measures of weight or mass);
* scads;
* buckets;
* some-odd;
* a couple (although a couple is also a set of two);
* a couple-few or coupla few (in some dialects);
* bunch, as in "a whole bunch of..." - generally confined to American English use;
* [expletive] -load e.g. shitload or shitloads;
* metric fuck-ton, generally used by engineers or laborers;
* n-something (e.g., twenty something) as exemplified by the name of the television series "thirtysomething"

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 one dictionary, the word is derived from the slang "ump(ty)," a dash in Morse code (of imitative origin), plus "-teen." [ [http://bartleby.net/61/73/U0017300.html "American Heritage Dictionary"] , 4th edn.]

-illion

Words ending in the sound "-illion", such as zillion,cite book|first=Terry|last=Pratchett|title=Witches Abroad|publisher=HarperCollins|year=2002 ISBN 0-06-102061-3. [http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0061020613&id=mlChCK02ZcsC&pg=PA146&lpg=PA146&dq=squillion&sig=6Iadld7aw7ruSwGDmBB-fwhMUN4 p. 146] : "And you owe me a million billion trillion zillion squillion dollars."] jillion, [p. 1103, "The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English", vol. 2, edited by Eric Partridge, Tom Dalzell, and Terry Victor, Taylor & Francis, 2006, ISBN 041525938X.] and gazillion, [Included in the standard dictionary included with Microsoft Word word-processing software.] 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 by the average human mind.

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.

Many similar words are used, such asananillion, [cite book|title=Fruit on the Crow's Mind|first=Michael A.|last=Williams|publisher=The Times|year=1994 ISBN 0-368-55763-0. p. 148: "I hate swimming an ananillion times more than I hate bananas."] bajillion, [cite book|title=Plain Brown Wrapper|first=Karen G.|last=Bates|publisher=HarperCollins|year=2005 ISBN 0-380-80891-9. p. 86: "Well, yes, it was, and the rumor that there were seventy bajillion women to every man just wouldn't die..."] bazillion, [cite book|first=Colin|last=Harrison|title=Afterburn|publisher=St. Martin's Press|year=2001 ISBN 0-312-97870-7. p. 278: "I wouldn't sleep with him in a bazillion years, but I'm not scared of him."] dillion,cite web|url=http://www.smbhq.com/nc/death19.html|title=Neglected Character Deathmatch: Zadok vs Birdo vs Geno|accessdate=2008-05-23|last=Resop|first=Jay|date=2004-04-01|work=Neglected Mario Characters|publisher=SMBHQ|quote=Duh nah timez a billion million zillion trillion killion dillion!] gadzillion, [cite book|title=Bun in the Oven|first=Kaz|last=Cooke|publisher=Ten Speed Press|year=2003 ISBN 1-58008-531-8. p. 3: "...and then the editor asked a gadzillion questions..."] gagillion, [cite book|title=Murder in Scorpio|first=Martha C.|last=Lawrence|publisher=St. Martin's Press|year=1996 ISBN 0-312-95984-2. p. 114: "The brochures basically told the same story Stan had given me: Pacific Properties owned a gagillion places that generated a gagillion dollars."] gajillion, [cite book|title=U.S. Armed Forces Arsenal: A Guide to Modern Combat Hardware|first=Samuel A.|last=Southworth|year=2004|publisher=Da Capo Press|id=ISBN 0-306-81318-1 [http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0306813181&id=GNMc1NSD8RoC&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&sig=M8O_dxvZR5-kLVyf7EQoHK_mRWM p. 98] : "The expectation was that the Soviets would roll a gajillion of their ever-improving but still basic tanks across the landscape..."] godzillion, [cite book|title=Strong Motion|first=Jonathan|last=Franzen|publisher=Picador|year=2001 ISBN 0-312-42051-X. 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."] gonillion, [cite book|first=Steve|last=Goldberg|title=Truth and Love|publisher=Random House|year=1986 ISBN 0-380-80632-0. p. 302: "The curtains had a gonillion dust particles on them, like grandmother's dentures."] grillion, [cite book|title=The Pastime in Turbulence: Interviews with Baseball Players of the 1940s|first=Brent|last=Kelley|year=2001|publisher=McFarland and Company ISBN 0-7864-0975-4. p. 8: "After that, evenexpansion and grillion-dollar salaries could not harm it."] hojillion,cite penny arcade |y=2001 |m=06 |d=22 |title=Magic: It's What's For Dinner!] julillion, [cite book|title=The Lampost Next Door|first=Sandra|last=Himmelstein|year=1997|publisher=Picador ISBN 0-678-73773-2. p. 67 "Make a wish, on any one of the julillion stars."] kabillion, [cite book|first=Ann|last=Hodgman|title=Beat That!|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Cookbooks|year=1999 ISBN 0-395-97178-0. p. 115: "That's about all I remember, except for this salad and the ninety kabillion manicotti someone else brought."] kajillion, [cite book|title=10 Clowns Don't Make a Circus|author=Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman|publisher=Adams Media|year=2006 ISBN 1-59337-555-7. p. 122: "You are not going to sell a kajillion of anything just because it's the coolest little gizmo you ever saw or because your Uncle Ernie said you would."] katrillion, [cite book|title=Tales From the House of Bunnicula #4: Screaming Mummies of the Pharaoh's Tomb II|first=James|last=Howe|publisher=Atheneum Books for Young Readers|year=2003 ISBN 0-689-83954-5 p.2 "He [Uncle Harold] has been writing for a katrillion years and his books have sold a katrillion copies, even if he has gotten some stinko reviews."] killion,robillion, [cite book|title=The Creeping Game|first=George|last=Hanneman|publisher=The Times|year=1988 ISBN 0-233-83992-X. p. 19 "It was the robillionth time they had done it, but it was as fun as ever before."] skillion, [cite book|first=Rob|last=Kean|title=The Pledge|publisher=Warner Books|year=2000 ISBN 0-446-60848-3. p. 429: "Sure enough, I found a skillion articles from about a dozen years ago, accounts of the events and aftermath of Cherry Plain."] squillion, andumptillion. [cite book|title=How Precious Was That While|first=Piers|last=Anthony|publisher=Tor/Forge|year=2002 ISBN 0-8125-7543-1. 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."]

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."

At-least numbers

These terms refer to any of a set of numbers, where only the smallest is defined. The list is ordered numerically by this minimum:
* Sagan: a humorous number equal to at least 4 billion (4x10⁹)
* Hyperfinite numbers: Numbers larger than 10¹⁵⁰. In the intelligent design concept of "specified complexity", a probability of the multiplicative inverse of it was proposed as the limit where events were possible in our universe. [ [http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Hyperfinite_Number ISCID Encyclopedia of Science and Philosophy - Hyperfinite Number] ]

See also

* "Powers of Ten"
* Inherently funny word

References