https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

Depending on context (i.e. language, culture, region, ...) some large numbers have names that allow for describing large quantities in a textual form; not mathematical. For very large values, the text is generally shorter than a decimal numeric representation although longer than scientific notation.

Two naming scales for large numbers have been used in English and other European languages since the early modern era: the long and short scales. Most English variants use the short scale today, but the long scale remains dominant in many non-English-speaking areas, including continental Europe and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. These naming procedures are based on taking the number n occurring in 10³ⁿ⁺³ (short scale) or 10⁶ⁿ (long scale) and concatenating Latin roots for its units, tens, and hundreds place, together with the suffix -illion.

Names of numbers above a trillion are rarely used in practice; such large numbers have practical usage primarily in the scientific domain, where powers of ten are expressed as 10 with a numeric superscript. However, these somewhat rare names are considered acceptable for approximate statements. For example, the statement "There are approximately 7.1 octillion atoms in an adult human body" is understood to be in short scale of the table below (and is only accurate if referring to short scale rather than long scale).

The Indian numbering system uses the named numbers common between the long and short scales up to ten thousand. For larger values, it includes named numbers at each multiple of 100; including lakh (10⁵) and crore (10⁷).

English also has words, such as zillion, that are used informally to mean large but unspecified amounts.