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.

2236: Why Tu BShvat is called 'Tu' Jan 28, 2021

The Jewish holiday of Tu B'Shvat—which just ended if you read this at the time of publication—is named for the date: the 15th of the month of Shvat (שבט‎). 'Tu' (ט״ו) is not a number however though it is seen here and also in the holiday Tu B’Av. Indeed, Hebrew uses a quasi-decimalized numerical system for writing numbers based off the order of the alphabet, as with Greek numerals, but while numbers from ten (י), eleven (יא or 10+1), twelve (יב or 10+2) etc. just go in order that way with addition, 15 and 16 are represented ט״ו‎‎ (9 + 6) and ט״ז‎‎ (9 + 7) as to avoid writing out one of the spellings for a name of Gd. It just so happens טו would be pronounced 'tu', but in normal speech the word would be חמש-עשרה (chamesh-esre).