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Indefinite and fictitious numbers

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Many languages have words expressing indefinite and fictitious numbers—inexact terms of indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as placeholder names, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. One technical term for such words is "non-numerical vague quantifier".[1] Such words designed to indicate large quantities can be called "indefinite hyperbolic numerals".[2]

Specific values used as indefinite

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  • In Arabic, 1001 is used similarly, as in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (lit. "a thousand nights and one night").[3] Many modern English book titles use this convention as well: 1,001 Uses for ....
  • In Chinese, 十萬八千里; 十万八千里; shí wàn bā qiān lǐ, 108,000 li, means a great distance.
  • In Danish, hundrede og sytten ("a hundred and seventeen") can mean any arbitrary number.[4]
  • In English, some words that have a precise numerical definition are often used indefinitely: couple, 2;[5] dozen, 12; score, 20; myriad, 10,000. Unlike cardinal numbers these can be pluralized, in which case they require of before the noun (millions of dollars, but five million dollars) and require the indefinite article "a" in the singular (a million letters (indefinite) but one million letters (definite)).
  • In French, 36 and 36,000 are occasionally used as a synonym for "very many".
  • In Hebrew and other Middle Eastern traditions, the number 40 is used to express a large but unspecific number,[6][3] as in the Hebrew Bible's "forty days and forty nights", Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.[7][8] This usage is sometimes found in English as well (for example, "forty winks").[9][10]
  • In Irish, 100,000 (céad míle) is used, as in the phrase céad míle fáilte, "a hundred thousand welcomes" or Gabriel Rosenstock's poetic phrase Irish: mo chéad míle grá ("my hundred thousand loves").[11]
  • In Japanese, 八千, 8000, is used: 八千草 (lit. 8,000 herbs) means a variety of herbs and 八千代 (lit. 8,000 generations) means eternity.
  • In Latin, sescenti (600) was used to mean a very large number, perhaps from the size of a Roman cohort.[12] The modern word million derives from an Italian augmentative of the Latin word for thousand, mille.[13]
  • In Polish, tysiąc pięćset sto dziewięćset ("one thousand five hundred one hundred nine hundred") is used, to refer to an indefinitely large number.[citation needed]
  • In Scottish Gaelic, 100,000 (ceud mìle) is used to mean a great number, as in the phrase ceud mìle fàilte, "a hundred thousand welcomes."[14]
  • In Swedish, femtioelva or sjuttioelva is used (lit. "fifty-eleven" and "seventy-eleven", although never actually intended to refer to the numbers 61 and 81).
  • In Thai, ร้อยแปด (roi paed) means both 108 and miscellaneous, various, plentiful.[15]
  • In Welsh, cant a mil, literally "a hundred and thousand", is used to mean a large number in a similar way to English "a hundred and one".[16] It is used in phrases such as cant a mil o bethau i'w wneud "a hundred and one things to do" i.e. "many, many things to do".

The number 10,000 is used to express an even larger approximate number, as in Hebrew רבבה revâvâh,[17] rendered into Greek as μυριάδες, and to English myriad.[18] Similar usage is found in the East Asian 萬 or 万 (lit. 10,000; pinyin: wàn), and the South Asian lakh (lit. 100,000).[19]

Umpteen

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Umpteen, umteen or umpty[20] 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.[21] This is confirmed by a humorous short story in the North Carolina Hillsborough Recorder of June 30, 1852.[22]

By 1905, "umpty", in the expression "umpty-seven", had come to imply a multiple of ten.[23][24] Umpty came from a verbalization of a dash in Morse code.[23]

"Umpteen", adding the ending -teen, as in "thirteen", is first attested in 1884,[25][26][20][27] and has become by far the most common form.[28]

In Norwegian, ørten is used in a similar way, playing on the numbers from tretten (13) to nitten (19), but often signifying a much larger number.[29]

Similarly, though with a larger base, Portuguese has milhentos, which is derived from the words mil(har) (1000) and the suffix -entos, present in words like trezentos (300) or quinhentos (500), roughly meaning "hundred".[30]

-illion

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"Zillion" redirects here. For other uses, see Zillion (disambiguation).

Words with the suffix -illion (e.g., zillion,[31] gazillion,[32] bazillion,[33] jillion,[34] bajillion,[35] squillion,[36] and others) are often used as informal names for unspecified large numbers by analogy to names of large numbers such as million (106), billion (109) and trillion (1012). In Estonian, the compound word mustmiljon ("black million") is used to mean an unfathomably large number. In Hungarian, csilliárd is used[citation needed] in the same "indefinitely large number" sense as "zillion" in English, and is thought to be a humorous portmanteau of the words csillag ("star", referring to the vast number of stars) and milliárd ("billion", cf. long scale).

These words are intended to denote a number that is large enough to be unfathomable and are typically used as hyperbole or for comic effect. They have no precise value or order. They form ordinals and fractions with the usual suffix -th, e.g. "I asked her for the jillionth time", or are used with the suffix "-aire" to describe a wealthy person.

Other

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A "sagan" or "sagan unit" is a facetious name for a very large number inspired by Carl Sagan's association with the phrase "billions and billions".[37] It is not to be confused with Sagan's number, the number of stars in the observable universe.

See also

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Look up Thesaurus:zillion in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References

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  1. ^ "Bags of Talent, a Touch of Panic, and a Bit of Luck: The Case of Non-Numerical Vague Quantifiers" from Linguista Pragensia, Nov. 2, 2010 Archived 2012-07-31 at archive.today
  2. ^ "The surprising history of indefinite hyperbolic numerals - The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  3. ^ a b "Biblical Criticism", The Classical Journal 36:71:83ff (March 1827) full text
  4. ^ "ORDNET.DK Dansk sprog i ordbøger og korpus".
  5. ^ "couple (noun)", Merriam-Webster Dictionary, definition 4
  6. ^ A.D. Alderson, Fahir İz, The Concise Oxford Turkish Dictionary, Oxford, 1959, s.v. kırk: "Forty; used especially to denote a large indefinite number
  7. ^ Michael David Coogan, A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context, Oxford, 2008, p. 116
  8. ^   Levias, Caspar (1905). "Numbers and numerals". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 349. Retrieved 2017-04-27. "Forty: Stands in the Bible for a generation (e.g., the forty years of wandering in the desert), hence for any period of time the exact duration of which is unknown (comp. Gen. vii. 4, 12, 17; viii. 6; Ex. xxiv. 18, xxxiv. 28; Deut. ix. 9, 11, 18; x. 10; I Sam. xvii. 16; I Kings xix. 8; Jonah iii. 4). In later literature forty is commonly used as a round number (comp. Giṭ. 39b, 40a; Soṭah 34a; Yer. Ta'an. iv. 8; et al.)."
  9. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 1st edition, s.v. 'forty' A.b.
  10. ^ Tréguer, Pascal (November 16, 2017). "Meaning and Origin of 'Forty Winks'". Word Histories.
  11. ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-04-03. Retrieved 2017-04-02.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  12. ^ Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. sescenti
  13. ^ "Million". Online Etymological Dictionary. Retrieved 19 August 2022.
  14. ^ "Dictionaries of the Scots Language:: SND :: sndns743". Retrieved 2024-05-16.
  15. ^ "ร้อยแปด - Thai / English dictionary meaning - ร้อยแปด ภาษาอังกฤษ แปล ความหมาย". www.thai2english.com. Retrieved 2019-02-03.
  16. ^ "Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru Online".
  17. ^ "H7233 רבבה - Strong's Hebrew Lexicon". studybible.info. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  18. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, s.v. 'myriad'
  19. ^ Oxford English Dictionary 1st ed., s.v. 'lakh'
  20. ^ a b "Umpteen". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 14 April 2012. (available online to subscribers)
  21. ^ "River Imports". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 16 October 2024. (Available online to subscribers.)
  22. ^ "The Pocket Book". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 16 October 2024. (Available online to subscribers.)
  23. ^ a b "Umpty". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 14 April 2012. (available online to subscribers)
  24. ^ Warren Harding, quoted in Advertising & Selling 29:28-52:26 (1920)
  25. ^ "Umpteen". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 17 October 2024. (Available online to subscribers.)
  26. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  27. ^ Umpteen, Merriam-Webster. Accessed 2014-06-29.
  28. ^ "Google Ngram Viewer". books.google.com. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  29. ^ "Det Norske Akademis ordbok: ørten". www.naob.no. Retrieved 2019-12-23.
  30. ^ S.A, Priberam Informática. "milhentos". Dicionário Priberam (in Brazilian Portuguese). Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  31. ^ "Definition of ZILLION". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  32. ^ Included in the standard dictionary included with Microsoft Word word-processing software
  33. ^ "Definition of BAZILLION". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 2022-02-06.
  34. ^ Partridge, Eric; Dalzell; Victor, Terry, eds. (2006). The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Vol. 2. Taylor & Francis. p. 1103. ISBN 0-415-25938-X.
  35. ^ "Definition of Bajillion". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  36. ^ "squillion". Oxford Dictionaries. Archived from the original on November 4, 2018. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  37. ^ William Safire, ON LANGUAGE; Footprints on the Infobahn, New York Times, April 17, 1994
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