This is the allusionist, in which I Helen Zoltzman, very language and sound at the beach.

On with the show.

One, two, three, four, seven two, seventy three, seventy four, one hundred and seventy eight, one hundred and eighty.

Nineteen, nine hundred and ninety nine, six million, seventy two, seventy three, seventy, seventy, seventy, sixty, where are we?

How many zeros are we on now?

Well, I think actually most speakers of English above trillion get extremely extremely vague and don't really know what's going on up there.

Oh, okay. Thanks for making me feel better about myself.

My name is Stephen Krasomalus and I'm a linguistic anthropologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

And when we do get a bit lost among the big numbers, rather than using a specific like quadrillion or quadrillion,

that has seventy five zeros behind it, we might use a word that suggests a really big number such as zillion,

zillion and squillion.

These are known as indefinite hyperbolic numerals.

Indefinite hyperbolic numerals are words that have the form of numerals, they act like numerals.

But as their name would suggest, they're indefinite, they don't have a definite numerical reference and they're hyperbolic.

In other words, they're whatever they are, however big they are, they're really big.

Well, not all of them are really big.

The smallest indefinite hyperbolic numerals are words like umptine and umptine and umptisteen and forty-leaven.

These are big indefinite, but we still have a sense that these are quite small because of the morphemes t and t.

Those words behave like the real number words, so we deduce that they refer to similar quantities.

This suggests that they're maybe less than a hundred because on the model of fifteen or seventy,

we imagine that umpti is big, but it's probably not a thousand.

Then above that you have the numerals like zillion and jillion and squillion.

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