Many languages have words expressing indefinite and fictitious numbers—inexact terms of indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as

placeholder name Placeholder names are words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are tip of the tongue, temporarily forgotten, are not relevant to the salient point at hand, are to avoid stigmatization, are unknowable/unpredictable in ...

s, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. One technical term for such words is "non-numerical vague quantifier". Such words designed to indicate large quantities can be called "indefinite hyperbolic numerals".

Specific values used as indefinite

* In

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, some words that have a precise numerical definition are often used indefinitely: couple, 2;

dozen A dozen (commonly abbreviated doz or dz) is a grouping of twelve. The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive integer groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the Moon, or months, in a cycle of the Sun, or year ...

, 12; score, 20;

myriad A myriad (from Ancient Greek grc, μυριάς, translit=myrias, label=none) is technically the number 10,000 (ten thousand); in that sense, the term is used in English almost exclusively for literal translations from Greek, Latin or Sinospher ...

, 10,000. Unlike

cardinal number In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. Th ...

s these can be pluralized, in which case they require ''of'' before the noun (''millions of dollars'', but ''five million dollars'') and require the indefinite article "a" in the singular (''a million letters'' (indefinite) but ''one million letters'' (definite)). * In various Middle Eastern traditions, the number 40 is used to express a large but unspecific number,"Biblical Criticism", ''The Classical Journal'' 36:71:83''ff'' (March 1827
full text
/ref> as in the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. Hebrew: ''Tān ...

's "forty days and forty nights", ''

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" ( ar, علي بابا والأربعون لصا) is a folk tale from the ''One Thousand and One Nights''. It was added to the collection in the 18th century by its French translator Antoine Galland, who heard ...

'', and the

Forty Martyrs of Sebaste The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste or the Holy Forty (Ancient/Katharevousa Greek ''Ἅγιοι Τεσσεράκοντα''; Demotic: ''Άγιοι Σαράντα'') were a group of Roman soldiers in the Legio XII ''Fulminata'' (Armed with Lightning) w ...

.Michael David Coogan, ''A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context'', Oxford, 2008, p. 116 This usage is sometimes found in English as well (for example, "

forty winks {{Short pages monitor Words with the

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

''-illion'' (e.g. zillion, gazillion, bazillion, jillion, bajillion, squillion, and others) are often used as informal names for unspecified large numbers by analogy to

names of large numbers Two naming scales for large numbers have been used in English and other European languages since the early modern era: the long and short scales. Most English variants use the short scale today, but the long scale remains dominant in many non-Eng ...

such as ''

million One million (1,000,000), or one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001. The word is derived from the early Italian ''millione'' (''milione'' in modern Italian), from ''mille'', "thousand", plus the au ...

'' (10⁶), ''

billion Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions: *1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is its only current meaning in English. * 1,000,000,000,000, i.e ...

'' (10⁹) and ''

trillion ''Trillion'' is a number with two distinct definitions: * 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English. * 1,000,000,000,0 ...

'' (10¹²). In Estonian, the compound word ''mustmiljon'' ("black million") is used to mean an unfathomably large number. These words are intended to denote a number that is large enough to be unfathomable and are typically used as

hyperbole Hyperbole (; adj. hyperbolic ) is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis (literally 'growth'). In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and ...

or for comic effect. They have no precise value or order. They form ordinals and

fractions A fraction (from la, fractus, "broken") represents a part of a whole or, more generally, any number of equal parts. When spoken in everyday English, a fraction describes how many parts of a certain size there are, for example, one-half, eight ...

with the usual suffix ''-th'', e.g. "I asked her for the jillionth time", or "-illionaire" to describe a wealthy person.

Other

A " sagan" or "sagan unit" is a facetious name for a very large number, at least four billion, inspired by

Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ext ...

's association with the phrase "

billions and billions ''Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium'' is a 1997 book by the American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan. The last book written by Sagan before his death in 1996, it was published by Rando ...

".Sagan
at dictionary.reference.com (definition from the Jargon File) It is not to be confused with

Sagan's number Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ext ...

, the number of stars in the

observable universe The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because the electromagnetic radiation from these obj ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Indefinite And Fictitious Numbers Large numbers * de:Zahlennamen#Zillion

Specific values used as indefinite

Other

See also

References