1,000,000,000,000,000 trillion

Size zero has been getting diminishing returns on the catwalk as more curvy numbers step up to be counted, but science is one arena where it’s more the merrier as far as the zero is concerned. The difficulty lies in putting a name to the extending chorusline of noughty figures. Kilo, giga, peta and zetta have a cutesy appeal that quite belies their ballooning proportions of three, nine, 15 and 21 zeros after the first digit respectively, but not all of their ilk are so lucky. Deca, hecto, mega, terra, exa and yotta sound rather like the names of gargantuan superhero additions to the Fantastic Four rather than simple descriptions of their one, two, three, six, 12,18 and 24 rounded appendages. But when the number of zeros ratchets up another notch to 27, the name-calling peters off. That could be why some 30,000 enthusiasts and scientists have signed an online petition directed at the International System of Units (SI) to allow ‘hella’ to be the nomenclature for the 27-zero number. They say this measurement unit has been made necessary by recent scientific developments that require quantifications of inter-galactic distances, the wattage of the sun, and the like. Those are hella big numbers so designating one word for it would be more succinct than “thousand million million million million” or “billion billion billion” or even “10 to the 27th power”.
   
The adoption of this Californian slang word meaning ‘a lot of’ as the prefix could actually do numbers a world of good. For, the sad truth is that besides sounding like petnames and acronyms, these words rarely emerge from the rarefied confines of quantum physics. Their sheer size makes them unsuitable to be toted as conversational accessories to dinner parties or grocery stores. After all, googol, a big daddy among big numbers — 10 to the 100th power — languished in obscurity since it was coined in 1938 till two geeks remodelled it to be the name of their search engine. So zeroing in on words we can relate to — shunya, nada, naught, nothing, nix, null, zilch, zip, zot — may be the answer.