Powers of 10

Visualisation of powers of ten from one to 1 billion.

This article is about the mathematical concept. For the American TV series, see Power of 10 (TV series). For other uses, see Power of 10 (disambiguation).

In mathematics, a power of ten is any of the integer powers of the number ten; in other words, ten multiplied by itself a certain number of times. By definition, the number one is a power (the zeroth power) of ten. The first few powers of ten are:

1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000, 1000000000 ... (sequence A011557 in OEIS)

Name	Power	Number	SI symbol	SI prefix
One	0	1	-	uni
Ten	1	10	da	deca
Hundred	2	100	h	hecto
Thousand	3	1,000	k	kilo
Million	6	1,000,000	M	mega
Billion (Milliard)	9	1,000,000,000	G	giga
Trillion (Billion)	12	1,000,000,000,000	T	tera
Quadrillion	15	1,000,000,000,000,000	P	peta
Quintillion	18	1,000,000,000,000,000,000	E	exa
Sextillion	21	1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	Z	zetta
Septillion	24	1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000	Y	yotta

In decimal notation the nth power of ten is written as '1' followed by n zeroes. It can also be written as 10ⁿ or as 1En in E notation. See order of magnitude and orders of magnitude (numbers) for named powers of ten.

The sequence of powers of ten can also be extended to negative powers:

Name	Power	Number	SI symbol	SI prefix
Tenth	−1	0.1	d	deci
Hundredth	−2	0.01	c	centi
Thousandth	−3	0.001	m	milli
Millionth	−6	0.000 001	μ	micro
Billionth	−9	0.000 000 001	n	nano