entry
decillion
/dɪˈsɪljən/A number equal to one followed by thirty zeros
From Latin dec (ten) + French mathematical formation illion (suffix for names of very large numbers).
Word Ancestry
A decillion is the sort of number that makes a bank vault look like a child’s piggy bank: in the modern short-scale system, it is 1 followed by 30 zeros. Its first half is a straightforward numerical survivor, the Latin decem, “ten,” which also gives us decade, decimal, and even December—originally the tenth month of the Roman year. The second half, -illion, belongs to a family of grand mathematical labels built around million and expanded through French and English usage. The word was already in print in 1709, in George Vaux’s translation of Johann Sturm’s Mathesis juvenilis, when mathematicians were still giving names to quantities that no one could realistically write out in ordinary prose. And there is a small trap here: “decillion” is not universally the same number in every naming system; under the long scale, historical European usage could assign it a much larger value. Remember it as “ten plus the -illion parade”—a Latin counting word boarding a French-made train of increasingly enormous numbers.
The Story
A decillion is the sort of number that makes a bank vault look like a child’s piggy bank: in the modern short-scale system, it is 1 followed by 30 zeros. Its first half is a straightforward numerical survivor, the Latin decem, “ten,” which also gives us decade, decimal, and even December—originally the tenth month of the Roman year. The second half, -illion, belongs to a family of grand mathematical labels built around million and expanded through French and English usage. The word was already in print in 1709, in George Vaux’s translation of Johann Sturm’s Mathesis juvenilis, when mathematicians were still giving names to quantities that no one could realistically write out in ordinary prose. And there is a small trap here: “decillion” is not universally the same number in every naming system; under the long scale, historical European usage could assign it a much larger value. Remember it as “ten plus the -illion parade”—a Latin counting word boarding a French-made train of increasingly enormous numbers.
Kin & Kindred
From 'dec'·ten
Derived Terms
English words from this root
From 'illion'·suffix for names of very large numbers
Derived Terms
English words from this root
Sources
Urban Dictionary
Wikipedia
Wiktionary