Indefinite Hyperbolic Numerals
Published: 2021-10-21I recently listened to one episode of my favorite podcast, A Way with Words. They talked about so-called “Indefinite Hyperbolic Numerals” (IHN). Those are words that describe large unspecified numbers, especially for exaggeration. In English, there are many IHN that, I think, were created based on some existing number. Let me enumerate some of them here.
forty eleven, fifty eleven
They are pronounced fast and can be sometimes spelled like forty-leven or fifty ‘leven. This is often used when you do or say the same thing over and over again (e.g. I told you this fifty eleven times!). These usually sound less in amount than other IHN that I’ll introduce below (it is because 40 (or 50) and 11 themselves are normal countable numbers).
umpteen, umteen, umpty
These words also mean “very large”, and they also mean just an indefinite number or several. This is totally understandable because the prefix um- means “about or around”.
zillion
This is definitely used as an unspecified very large number. It’s easy to imagine that someone replaced the m (b, tr) in million (billion, trillion) with the last letter of the alphabet ‘z’.
There are some more -illion words, such as bazillion, squillion, etc.
Other languages
Needless to say, there are many other examples in other languages as well. According to the aforementioned podcast, in French, the number 36 can represent a large number.
In Japanese, we have the word 億万長者, which means millionaire or billionaire. Here, 億万 is not the correct expression of the actual number, althouth 億 or 万 itself is the correct unit of number. I don’t think it’s appropriate to use it as 億万回 (億万 times) because it sounds strange to me, but I found out that many people use it on Twitter (I see…).
千里 (千 means thousand, 里 is a Japanese or Chinese unit of length) can mean an indefinite distance, but is not really commonly used.
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