googol

WOTD - 23 January 2009    

English

Wikipedia

Etymology

Made up in 1938 by the nine year old Milton Sirrota, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner who had asked Milton for the hypothetical number of 10 to the 100th.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA: /ˈɡuː.ɡəl/, /ˈɡuː.ɡɒl/
• (US) IPA: /ˈɡu.ɡəl/, /ˈɡu.ɡɑl/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -uːɡəl
• Homophones: google, Google

Numeral

googol

1. (cardinal) The number 10¹⁰⁰, written as 1 followed by 100 zeros.
   • 1980, Carl Sagan, Cosmos, chapter IX

     If the universe were packed solid with neutrons, say, so there was no empty space anywhere, there would still only be about 10¹²⁸ particles in it, quite a bit more than a googol but trivially small compared to a googolplex.

Derived terms

• Google
• googolplex

Translations

1 followed by 100 zeros

Chinese: Mandarin: 古高爾 (cmn), 古高尔 (cmn) (gǔgāoěr) Dutch: please add this translation if you can Esperanto: guglo (eo) Estonian: googol (et) Finnish: googol (fi) French: gogol (fr) m. German: Googol (de) n. Greek: Γκούγκολ (el) (googol)

Hungarian: googol (hu) Japanese: 10の100乗 (ja) Lithuanian: gugolas (lt) Portuguese: googol (pt) m. Russian: гугол Spanish: gúgol (es) m. Swedish: googol (sv) c. Thai: กูกอล (th) (googon)