Octillions

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A numerical term representing a value equal to 10 raised to the power of 48
2. A figure in the U.S. system that follows septillion in the sequence of large numbers
3. Denoting specifically the quantity that is one followed by forty-eight zeros in counting systems

Etymology: "Octillions" is the plural of "octillion," and the singular is the more interesting half of the story. The word is a French formation, built from "oct-," meaning eight, and "-illion," the ending shared by the large-number names that were coined in the same pattern: million, billion, trillion, and so on. The "-illion" ending comes from "million" itself, which is in turn built on the Latin "mille," a thousand, with an augmentative suffix that turns it into "a big thousand." The pattern makes the names predictable. Each step adds a power of a thousand, but the French system counted by the million, so "octillion" names the number produced by eight groups of that scale. The English sense of the word, with forty-eight zeros, follows the French structure that the name encodes, which is why the word looks like it should mean something that sounds like "eight" but is far larger than that.