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Zillion
Indefinite and fictitious numbers are words, phrases and quantities used to describe an indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as placeholder names, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. Other descriptions of this concept include: "non-numerical vague quantifier" and "indefinite hyperbolic numerals". Umpteen Umpteen, umteen or umpty is an unspecified but large number, used in a humorous fashion or to imply that it is not worth the effort to pin down the actual figure. Despite the ''-teen'' ending, which would seem to indicate that it lies between 12 and 20, umpteen can be much larger. The oldest reference to "umpty" — in a June 17, 1848 issue of the ''Louisville Morning Courier'' — indicates that at that time it was slang for empty. (Available online to subscribers.) This is confirmed by a humorous short story in the North Carolina ''Hillsborough Recorder'' of June 30, 1852. (Available online to subscribers.) By 1905, "umpty", in the expressio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trillion
''Trillion'' is a number with two distinct definitions: *1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million 1,000,000, million, or (ten to the twelfth Exponentiation, power), as defined on the long and short scales, short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English. *Orders of magnitude (numbers)#1018, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, i.e. (ten to the eighteenth power), as defined on the long and short scales, long scale. This is one million times larger than the short scale trillion. This is the historical meaning in English and the current use in many non-English-speaking countries where ''trillion'' and ''billion'' (ten to the twelfth power) maintain their long scale definitions. Usage Originally, the United Kingdom used the long scale trillion. However, since 1974, official UK statistics have used the short scale. Since the 1950s, the short scale has been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism, although the long scale definition still has some limited u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Long And Short Scales
The long and short scales are two power of 10, powers of ten number naming systems that are consistent with each other for smaller order of magnitude, numbers, but are contradictory for larger numbers. Other numbering systems, particularly in East Asia and South Asia, have large number naming that differs from both the long and short scales. Such numbering systems include the Indian numbering system and Chinese numerals, Chinese, Japanese numerals#Powers of 10, Japanese, and Korean Peninsula, Korean numerals. Much of the remainder of the world adopted either the short or long scale. Countries using the long scale include most countries in continental Europe and most that are Geographical distribution of French speakers, French-speaking, Geographical distribution of German speakers, German-speaking and Hispanophone, Spanish-speaking. Use of the short scale is found in most Anglophone, English and Arabic speaking countries, most Eurasian post-communist countries and Brazil. F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Names Of Large Numbers
Depending on context (e.g. language, culture, region), some large numbers have names that allow for describing large quantities in a textual form; not mathematical. For very large values, the text is generally shorter than a decimal numeric representation although longer than scientific notation. Two naming scales for large numbers have been used in English and other European languages since the early modern era: the long and short scales. Most English variants use the short scale today, but the long scale remains dominant in many non-English-speaking areas, including continental Europe and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. These naming procedures are based on taking the number ''n'' occurring in 103''n''+3 (short scale) or 106''n'' (long scale) and concatenating Latin roots for its units, tens, and hundreds place, together with the suffix ''-illion''. Names of numbers above a trillion are rarely used in practice; such large numbers have practical usage primarily in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Placeholder Name
Placeholder names are intentionally overly generic and ambiguous terms referring to things, places, or people, the names of which or of whom do not actually exist; are temporarily forgotten, or are unimportant; or in order to avoid stigmatization, or because they are unknowable or unpredictable given the context of their discussion; or to deliberately expunge direct use of the name. Placeholder names for people are often terms referring to an average person or a predicted persona of a typical user. Linguistic role These placeholders typically function grammatically as nouns and can be used for people (e.g. '' John Doe, Jane Doe''), objects (e.g. '' widget''), locations ("Main Street"), or places (e.g. ''Anytown, USA''). They share a property with pronouns because their referents must be supplied by context; but, unlike a pronoun, they may be used with no referent—the important part of the communication is not the thing nominally referred to by the placeholder, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Myriad
In the context of numeric naming systems for powers of ten, myriad is the quantity ten thousand ( 10,000). Idiomatically, in English, ''myriad'' is an adjective used to mean that a group of things has indefinitely large quantity. ''Myriad'' derives from the ancient Greek for ten thousand () and is used with this meaning in literal translations from Greek, Latin or Sinospheric languages ( Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese), and in reference to ancient Greek numerals. The term ''myriad'' is also used in the form "a myriad" for a 100 km × 100 km square (10,000 km²) the grid size of the British Ordnance Survey National Grid and the US Military Grid Reference System. It contains 100 hectads. History The Aegean numerals of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations included a symbol composed of a circle with four dashes to denote tens of thousands. In classical Greek numerals, myriad was written as a capital mu: Μ. To distinguish this numeral from letters, i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
20 (number)
20 (twenty) is the natural number following 19 and preceding 21. A group of twenty units is sometimes referred to as a score. In mathematics Twenty is a composite number. It is also the smallest primitive abundant number. The Happy Family of sporadic groups is made up of twenty finite simple groups that are all subquotients of the friendly giant, the largest of twenty-six sporadic groups. Geometry An icosagon is a polygon with 20 edges. Bring's curve is a Riemann surface, whose fundamental polygon is a regular hyperbolic icosagon. Platonic solids The largest number of faces a Platonic solid can have is twenty faces, which make up a regular icosahedron. A dodecahedron, on the other hand, has twenty vertices, likewise the most a regular polyhedron can have. This is because the icosahedron and dodecahdron are duals of each other. Other fields Science 20 is the third magic number in physics. Biology In some countries, the number 20 is used as an index in m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dozen
A dozen (commonly abbreviated doz or dz) is a grouping of twelve. The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive integer groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the Moon, or months, in a cycle of the Sun, or year. Twelve is convenient because it has a maximal number of divisors among the numbers up to its double, a property only true of 1, 2, 6, 12, 60, 360, and 2520. The use of twelve as a base number, known as the duodecimal system (also as ''dozenal''), originated in Mesopotamia (see also sexagesimal). Twelve dozen (122 = 144) are known as a gross; and twelve gross (123 = 1,728, the duodecimal 1,000) are called a great gross, a term most often used when shipping or buying items in bulk. A great hundred, also known as a small gross, is 120 or ten dozen. Dozen may also be used to express a moderately large quantity as in "several dozen" (e.g., dozens of people came to the party). Varying by country, some products are packaged or sold b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Observable Universe
The observable universe is a Ball (mathematics), spherical region of the universe consisting of all matter that can be observation, observed from Earth; the electromagnetic radiation from these astronomical object, objects has had time to reach the Solar System and Earth since the beginning of the metric expansion of space, cosmological expansion. Assuming the universe is isotropy, isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is equidistant, the same in every direction. That is, the observable universe is a sphere, spherical region centered on the observer. Every location in the universe has its own observable universe, which may or may not overlap with the one centered on Earth. The word ''observable'' in this sense does not refer to the capability of modern technology to detect light or other information from an object, or whether there is anything to be detected. It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself. No signal can travel faster ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sagan's Number
Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by exposure to light. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any Extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.Extract of page 14 Initially an assistant professor at Harvard Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Safire
William Lewis Safire (; Safir; December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009Safire, William (1986). ''Take My Word for It: More on Language.'' Times Books. . p. 185.) was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He was a long-time syndicated political columnist for ''The New York Times'' and wrote the "On Language" column in ''The New York Times Magazine'' about popular etymology, new or unusual usages, and other language-related topics. Early life and education Safire was born William Lewis Safir in New York City, the son of Ida ( Panish) and Oliver Craus Safir. His family was Jewish and of Romanian origin on his father's side. Safire later added an "e" to his surname to better convey its pronunciation, while his brothers Leonard Safir and Matthew P. Safir continued to use the original spelling. Safire graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high school in New York City. He attended S. I. Newhouse School of Public C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by exposure to light. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any Extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.Extract of page 14 Initially an assistant professor at Harvard Universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
