Can you write the number one quadrillion?

Asked by LostInParadise (32183

) July 30th, 2019

I was listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air. She was speaking to a woman about her book on insects. It was mentioned that the total number of insects is in the quadrillions. Terry Gross said she was surprised to learn that there actually was such a number as quadrillion, a 1 followed by 15 0’s. She had thought it was a word like gazillion.

NPR people tend not to be very math savvy, but I thought that this was generally well known. Multiplying by 1,000 (adding three 0’s), you from one thousand to a million, billion, trillion and quadrillion. Making use of the Latin prefixes, you could continue with quintillion, hexillion, septillion and octillion, though my computer does not recognize these words.

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13 Answers

1,000,000,000,000,000.

RedDeerGuy1 (24945

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1 X 10^15

gondwanalon (23200

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1000000000000000

ragingloli (52231

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(hex- is actually a Greek prefix; the usual name for this number is “sextillion”).

I do find it amusing that Terry Gross didn’t know a quadrillion was a real number, but I guess one is more likely to come across these numbers used in hyperbole than in an actual scientific statement.

Demosthenes (15298

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Thanks for the correction. Polygons are Greek and numbers are Latin. Pentagons and hexagons but quintillion and sextillion.

LostInParadise (32183

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O.n.e q.u.a.d.r.i.l.l.i.o.n. Like that.

Dutchess_III (47068

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There are differences in labels for orders of magnitude by country: the US uses million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, while the UK uses million, thousand million, billion, thousand billion, trillion, thousand trillion, quadrillion..

So a quadrillion in the UK is 10^{24, while in the US it is 10}15.

zenvelo (39546

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