2758: The World’s Biggest Number Jul 9, 2024

Lots of cultures use what is referred to as an indefinitely large number to express something enormous and uncountable. In English this would be “a million” used in lots of phrases like “thanks a million” or “I did X a million times”, and while it may make sense to use this number in such a context, especially as it is relatively concise as a base unit, many other languages use different ones. For instance, Celtic languages like Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish use 100,000, French uses 36, Hungarian 26, and some languages make up numbers altogether such as Swedish’s femtioelva literally “fifty-eleven” (not actually 61).

One number used conspicuously often for this purpose is 10,000, but not simply as a construction. Many languages, especially ancient languages, had a separate word for ten-thousand; compare Hebrew’s 

תשעת אלפים (tishat elfim) = 9,000

רבבה (rivava) = 10,000

עשרים אלף (esrim elef) 20,000

This has the sense of ‘many’ and doesn’t resemble the rest of the words for multiples of a thousand, though in the plural form it can also mean the somewhat uncounted “tens of thousands”. This exact same phenomenon around 10,000-words occurs in Greek μυριάδες (myriades), hence English’s ‘myriad’, Sanskrit’s अयुत (ayuta), and Chinese 萬 (wan) used in many East Asian cultures. 

There are too many examples to count, not even including made up numbers like ‘umpteen’ or ‘bazillion’, so please write back any others you know.