gillion
/ˈɡɪljən/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.22 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
num
A thousand million, proposed as an alternative to the (now little used) British milliard and the (ambiguous, in the UK) US billion.
British usage
Example Sentences
- "The internationally agreed symbol for 10^6 is M and this is the initial letter of million. Would it not be logical and convenient to turn this happy accident into a principle and use G, the internationally agreed symbol for 10^9, as the initial letter of the word for 1,000,000,000? That number would thus be called a gillion. Whether the g should be hard or soft is a matter of opinion. I incline to hard because of the derivation from giga."
- "At Guy's school there had been an outdoor pool, in use from April to October, a watery grave for a billion insects, or quite possibly a gillion or a squillion. The bright turquoise lining had wrinkled under the children's feet."
- "I looked down to see my dog, Roof, short for Rufus, curled in sleep below the window, unworried by the wings of hummingbirds whirring at speeds of a gillion miles an hour as they flitted in and out of the trumpets of honeysuckle growing on the side of the house."