In 1484, French mathematician Nicolas Chuquet invented the system for naming large numbers in his manuscript "Triparty en la science des nombres," giving us the words million, billion, trillion, and beyond. His method of grouping by powers of a million sparked a quiet revolution in how we conceptualize enormous quantities, a framework that still shapes how big numbers are named today, though it split into the long and short scales we now argue over between continents.
The short version
Nicolas Chuquet, a French physician and mathematician, wrote the first known system for naming large numbers in 1484. He proposed using Latin-derived prefixes (bi-, tri-, quadri-) attached to the word "million" to denote successive powers of a million. This system evolved into two competing conventions: the long scale (used in most of Europe) where each term is a million times the previous, and the short scale (used in the US and UK) where each term is a thousand times the previous.
- Nicolas Chuquet introduced the naming system for large numbers in his 1484 manuscript "Triparty en la science des nombres."
- Chuquet's original system defined billion as a million million (10^12), trillion as a million billion (10^18), and so on.
- The short scale, where billion means a thousand million (10^9), became standard in the United States and later in the United Kingdom.
- The words googol (10^100) and googolplex (10^(10^100)) were coined by Milton Sirotta, not by Chuquet.
- The largest named number in Chuquet's system is centillion, which equals 10^303 in the short scale.
How Did We Learn to Name Numbers So Big They Break Our Brains?
You probably played this game as a kid: someone says "a billion billion billion," and you counter with "trillion," then "quadrillion," then you make up words like "squillion" or "kajillion" just to win. It's a playful contest, but it points to a real puzzle, how big numbers are named isn't just child's play. It's a system that mathematicians have been figuring out for centuries, and its origin story starts in 1484 with a French scholar named Nicolas Chuquet.
Chuquet wasn't a famous mathematician in his day. Born in Paris, he studied medicine, earned a license, and later moved to Lyon, where he died in his thirties. He left behind just one notable work: Triparty en la science des nombres (The Three-Part Treatise on the Science of Numbers). In that manuscript, he scribbled an enormous number, 7,493,248,043,000,700,023,654,321, and then, starting from the right, marked it off in groups of six digits. The first group he called "millions." The next? "Byllion." Then "tryllion," "quadrillion," "quyllion," "sixlion," "septyllion," "ottyllion," and finally "nonyllion." It was the first known proposal for a systematic naming system using the "-illion" suffix.
That childhood game of one-upping each other with made-up number names? It turns out we were channeling a 15th-century mathematician without even knowing it.
The Origin of 'Million': A Big Thousand
The word "million" literally means "big thousand," a fact baked right into its Italian roots. It comes from the Italian millione, a combination of the Latin mille (thousand) and the augmentative suffix -one, used to make things bigger. So a million isn't just a thousand, it's a thousand magnified, a thousand on steroids.
This linguistic trick caught on fast. By the mid-15th century, people were already playing with the idea, tossing around terms like "bimillion" (a million times a million) and "trimillion" (a million times a million times a million). It was a game of scaling up, each new word reaching for a number so large it felt almost mythical.
Then, in 1484, a French mathematician named Nicolas Chuquet took the game to the next level. Chuquet was no household name, he studied medicine in Paris, moved to Lyon, and died in his thirties, leaving behind just one notable work: Triparty en la science des nombres (Three-Part Treatise on the Science of Numbers). In that manuscript, he proposed a systematic way to name large numbers using the -illion suffix. He wrote out a staggering number, 7,493,248,043,000,700,023,654,321, and grouped it from right to left in blocks of six digits. Each block got a name: the first was millions, then byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, ottyllion, and nonyllion. It was a blueprint for how big numbers are named, and it stuck.
Nicolas Chuquet: The Obscure Mathematician Who Named the Unimaginable
In 1484, a little-known French mathematician named Nicolas Chuquet jotted down a number so vast it stretched seventy digits long, and then calmly invented the system we still use today for naming impossibly large figures. Chuquet was born in Paris, studied medicine, then moved to Lyon, where he died in his thirties. He was never a famous mathematician in his own time; only one work survives: the manuscript Triparty en la science des nombres. And inside that dusty manuscript lies the quiet birth of how big numbers are named.
Chuquet wrote the number 7,493,248,043,000,700,023,654,321, a sprawling sequence that would make most modern calculators blink. Then he did something simple yet revolutionary: he marked it off into groups of six digits, starting from the right. The first block represented millions. The second he called byllion. Then came tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, ottyllion, and finally nonyllion. These weren't just random sounds, they were a ladder, each rung a million times bigger than the last. Chuquet had, almost offhandedly, handed us the vocabulary for the infinite.
Long Scale vs. Short Scale: Why a Billion Isn't the Same Everywhere
In 1974, French mathematician Geneviève Guitel gave us the language to describe a centuries-old confusion: she named the two competing systems for naming big numbers the "long scale" and the "short scale." The short scale, used in North America and Turkey, treats each step as a factor of 1,000, so a billion is 1,000,000,000 (10⁹). The long scale, still used in many European countries, treats each step as a factor of 1,000,000, so a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 (10¹²).
This split traces back to Nicolas Chuquet's 1484 manuscript. Chuquet, a French mathematician who died in his thirties, proposed a system where each new "-illion" was a million times larger than the last. He wrote out the staggering number 7,493,248,043,000,700,023,654,321 and marked it off in six-digit blocks, calling them byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, and so on up to nonyllion. That original idea is the long scale: billion = million², trillion = million³, and the pattern continues.
But somewhere along the way, English speakers started shifting. By the 20th century, the United States had firmly adopted a simpler pattern: each step multiplies by 1,000 instead of 1,000,000. A short-scale quadrillion (10¹⁵) is 1,000 times a trillion (10¹²), and a quintillion (10¹⁸) is 1,000 times that. The Latin prefixes still work the same way, tri- for three, quad- for four, quin- for five, but the magnitude at each step is dramatically smaller.
Today, the short scale dominates in North America, most of the English-speaking world, and Turkey. According to the original account, it's also used in Arab countries, Brazil, and Russia, but records show those places actually follow the long scale, so the picture is more complicated than often reported. Either way, the names stretch all the way to centillion, which in the short scale equals 1 followed by 303 zeros. That's how big numbers are named: a system born in a medieval manuscript, reshaped by centuries of use, and still tripping up translators today.
Googol and Googolplex: Numbers Too Big to Write
Googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros, a number you could write out if you had the patience. But googolplex, 10 raised to the power of a googol, is so astronomically huge that no amount of paper on Earth, nor all the matter in the observable universe, could hold its digits, even if each zero were drawn at subatomic size. This isn't exaggeration; it's a concrete fact that reveals the limits of physical representation for numbers.
Think about that for a moment. A googol itself, 10100, is already a 1 with a hundred zeros trailing behind it. You could scribble that on a piece of paper, though it'd take up a few lines. But a googolplex has more zeros than there are atoms in the known cosmos. The sheer gap between these two numbers is what makes the concept so staggering.
This is where how big numbers are named meets the edge of imagination. We have words like million, billion, trillion, each one a thousand times larger than the last in the short scale system used across North America, most of the English-speaking world, and Turkey. But googol and googolplex break free from that neat pattern. They were coined for pure intellectual play, not for counting anything real.
The story goes that mathematician Edward Kasner asked his nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta to invent a name for 10100 in the 1930s. The boy said "googol." Then Kasner asked for something even bigger, and Milton offered "googolplex," meaning "one, followed by zeros until you get tired." That charming childhood logic turned into a formal definition: a googolplex is 10googol, or 1 followed by a googol zeros.
To grasp the impossibility, consider this: the observable universe contains roughly 1080 atoms. A googol is already 10100, which is 1020 times more than all those atoms. And a googolplex? It's 10 raised to a power that itself dwarfs the number of atoms. Writing it out would require more zeros than there are particles in existence. Even if you shrunk each zero to the size of a proton, you'd run out of space in the universe before finishing the number.
This isn't just a math puzzle, it's a humbling peek into the scale of abstract thought. We can define googolplex with a simple exponent, but we cannot physically write it. That tension between what we can name and what we can represent is what makes big numbers so captivating. The next time you hear someone toss around the word "zillion," remember: googolplex is real, and it's already beyond our world's capacity to hold.
Conclusion: Grasping the Ungraspable
Even the most brilliant mathematical mind cannot fully comprehend the staggering scale of numbers like googolplex, and that is perfectly okay, what matters is that we build concepts that bridge imagination and physical reality. Ancient thinkers such as Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who lived in the third century BCE, were among the first to sense how enormous numbers could relate to the tangible world. He famously estimated the number of grains of sand needed to fill the universe, a feat that required him to invent a new counting system. Today, billions and trillions are everyday terms in news reports, science labs, and dinner-table conversations. A billion dollars, a trillion stars, these phrases roll off the tongue, yet their true magnitude remains elusive. The human mind evolved to handle small quantities, like how many apples are in a basket or how many people are in a village, not the vast expanses of a googol or a centillion.
This gap between our daily experience and the mathematical cosmos is where the real wonder lives. We may never truly feel the size of a googolplex, a number so large that the entire observable universe, even if every atom were a zero, could not hold its written form. But by naming these numbers, by giving them structure through systems like the short scale and long scale, we create a mental scaffolding. We learn how big numbers are named, tracing the path from Archimedes' sand reckoning to Nicolas Chuquet's 1484 manuscript with its byllions and tryllions, and onward to the googol coined by a child in the 1930s. Each term is a tiny handhold on a cliff face that stretches into infinity. The journey does not end with comprehension, it begins with curiosity, with the simple childlike question of what comes after a million, and the humble realization that some answers are too vast to hold, yet too beautiful to ignore.
FAQ: How Big Numbers Are Named
What is the origin of the word 'million'?
The word "million" comes from the Italian "millione," which literally means "big thousand." It combines the Latin root "mille" (thousand) with the Italian augmentative suffix "-one," so its core meaning is a thousand multiplied into something much larger.
Who first proposed a systematic way to name large numbers?
French mathematician Nicolas Chuquet first proposed a systematic naming method for large numbers in his 1484 manuscript "Triparty en la science des nombres." In that work, he introduced the "-illion" suffix pattern, creating terms like byllion, tryllion, and quadrillion by grouping digits in blocks of six.
What is the difference between the long scale and short scale?
The short scale multiplies by 1,000 at each step, so a billion equals 10^9. The long scale multiplies by 1,000,000 at each step, so a billion equals 10^12. French mathematician Geneviève Guitel named both systems in her 1974 book, distinguishing how countries define these large number names.
Why does 'billion' mean different numbers in different countries?
Countries use either the short scale or the long scale. In the short scale, used in North America and most English-speaking nations, a billion is 10^9. In the long scale, still used in parts of Europe and Latin America, a billion is 10^12. This difference traces back to how Chuquet's original 1484 system was later adapted.
How big is a googolplex compared to a googol?
A googol is 10^100, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googolplex is 10^googol, meaning 1 followed by a googol zeros. That number is so vast that all the paper on Earth and all matter in the universe could not write it, even if each zero were drawn at subatomic size.
Was Nicolas Chuquet a famous mathematician in his time?
No, Nicolas Chuquet was not a well-known figure in his era. He was born in Paris, studied medicine, and later moved to Lyon, where he died in his thirties. Only his single 1484 manuscript on number naming is remembered today, and he gained no significant recognition during his lifetime.
Can any number be written down physically?
No, numbers like googolplex have more digits than the number of atoms in the observable universe, making physical representation impossible. Even the most advanced mathematical minds cannot fully grasp such immensity, though concepts like the short scale and long scale help bridge the gap between imagination and reality.
Editor's note: Some historical details about the exact reception of Chuquet's manuscript remain unconfirmed, and the precise date of the first printed use of the short scale in Britain is uncertain.
By Staff Writer
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