Is trizillion a number

Answer 1

Logically, the term 'trizillion' might be used to describe three (or triple) zillion.

The term 'million' once indicated a huge amount, especially when referring to money. Five decades ago an impressive home could be built for $100,000; a million dollars was a lot of money back then.

Later, millionaires became commonplace and billionaires were the new millionaires. Now it's easier to say multi-billionaire than bother with exact words to describe how much money a person with multi-billions has; individual, government, and corporate wealth can change from day to day and even - in very exciting times - minute to minute.

So we use terms such as 'zillion', 'gazillion', and so on, to describe huge but nowhere-near-exact 'heaps', 'lots', 'countless', or 'never-ending' supplies or occurences of anything. Frequently we use these terms to describe relatively few, but overwhelming, numbers of something: 'We invited thirty, but somebody put it out on Twitter and we ended up with gazillions of people.' Not multi-billions, clearly, but at least over fifty, and too many to cater for.

While 'trizillion' mightn't - at the moment - be much use in maths class, there's no reason it can't join all the other words we need when we want to say there's more of something than we can easily imagine. We can always use more adjectives: look how functional 'humongous' turned out to be.

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According to one webpage, 'That number after a trillion is now officially trizillion.' The intention seems to be to describe the next 'set' in a sequence of number sets, as in million, billion, trillion, trizillion, in which case it makes no sense. We already have billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, and so on, in that series (which all have separate meanings in the UK and the US, but we needn't go into that here).

Trizillion certainly isn't 'officially' a word for a number: one webpage doesn't create a word. However, if zillions of people end up using it, it will become, officially, a word.

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