entry
septillion
/sɛpˈtɪljən/A thousand raised to the eighth power
From French sept- (seven).
from French septillion
from French septillion
from French septillion
from French septillion
Word Ancestry
from French septillion
from French septillion
from French septillion
from French septillion
A septillion sounds as though it ought to be a very grand “seven,” and in a sense it is: French sept- means “seven,” attached to the numerical suffix borrowed from million. The name was circulating by the 1680s, when mathematicians were turning huge quantities into pronounceable packages instead of forcing readers through endless columns of zeroes. In modern American and British short-scale usage, a septillion is 1 followed by 24 zeroes—the cube-sized mountain of digits represented as 10²⁴. Older British long-scale notation takes the same name much further, to 1 followed by 42 zeroes, a reminder that number names once crossed national borders with no passport agreement. And beware a false friend: the separate word sept, meaning a clan or enclosed group, has a tangled history involving sect and Latin saeptum; it is not the family tree behind the “seven” in septillion. Tomorrow’s memory hook is simple: septillion is the “seven-step” member of the -illion parade, standing at 10²⁴ in the short scale.
The Story
A septillion sounds as though it ought to be a very grand “seven,” and in a sense it is: French sept- means “seven,” attached to the numerical suffix borrowed from million. The name was circulating by the 1680s, when mathematicians were turning huge quantities into pronounceable packages instead of forcing readers through endless columns of zeroes. In modern American and British short-scale usage, a septillion is 1 followed by 24 zeroes—the cube-sized mountain of digits represented as 10²⁴. Older British long-scale notation takes the same name much further, to 1 followed by 42 zeroes, a reminder that number names once crossed national borders with no passport agreement. And beware a false friend: the separate word sept, meaning a clan or enclosed group, has a tangled history involving sect and Latin saeptum; it is not the family tree behind the “seven” in septillion. Tomorrow’s memory hook is simple: septillion is the “seven-step” member of the -illion parade, standing at 10²⁴ in the short scale.
Kin & Kindred
From 'sept-'·seven
Derived Terms
English words from this root
From '-illion'·large-number naming suffix modeled on million
Derived Terms
English words from this root
Sources
Etymonline
Free Dictionary
Urban Dictionary
Wikipedia
Wiktionary