Talk:Indefinite and fictitious numbers

This article was nominated for deletion on 3 June 2007. The result of the discussion was merge and redirect to Indefinite and fictitious large numbers.

I undid this merge, since there was no consensus (as the discussion shows). Just as many wanted to merge it the other way - that is, "Indefinite and ficitious large numbers" into THIS article. Please don't summarily make decisions when there's no consensus. - DavidWBrooks 22:11, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

• Well whatever the pagename there shouldn't be 2 articles on the same topic... people wanted to merge the two articles. Move the other one here if the name is that important. --W.marsh 22:41, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree, but once the "merge" vote started we needed to wait for it to end. It produced no consensus at all, alas, just confusing the matter. - DavidWBrooks 02:09, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

three-peat

What about three-peat? I know there's a separate article, but does it deserve no mention at all in this article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.249.64.128 (talk) 15:27, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

IMHO - no. It's not a number, it's a concept. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 21:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

More specifically, it's the application of the very definite number 3 to a specific realm, and outside the scope of the article.
--Jerzy•t 11:37, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Forty

In a prior revision, someone added the potential metaphorical use of the number forty (40) as used in the Old Testament. OR or not, it's simply a metaphorical use of a real number (much like how someone might say "millions" just to mean a large number), and thus is not fictitious. Hence, I'm highly doubtful that it should be included in an article specifically titled "Indefinite fictitious numbers". Quick note: I'm not the editor who reverted the "forty" addition; I'm just a supporter of the reversion. Sistema Sepiroticum (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 18:10, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Umpty

The ref'd entry, tho in a reliable source -- Am Her Dict's 4th edn def -- is not very useful for our purposes:

1. Since the context involves Morse code, "dash" is confusingly vague.

   Dash is of course the name of a punctuation mark, often confused with the hyphen, but it is also the name of one of the two (or rather, the two most prominent) code "atoms" of Morse, the dot and dash (also pronounced and spelled as dit and dah). (The other "atoms" i'm allowing for are: the pause between one dot or dash, and the next; the pause between one letter, number, or punctuation mark, and the next; and the pause between one word and the next.)

   My OR satisfies me that they are describing "ump" (but probably not "umpty") as the sound of dah: Morse code#Letters, numbers, punctuation does offer a Morse encoding of "double dash" (shown as "=" and linked to equals sign), and an underscore character, but no other mention of "dash" as something having an established Morse encoding.

   By elimination, that satisfies me that "dash" is used in the AHD def to mean the code atom, dash, aka dah, the complement of dot, aka dit (or di-). Perhaps what i've called OR is elementary enuf to be an exception to NOR.

2. The description

   Slang ump(ty), dash in Morse code (of imitative origin) + -teen (as in thirteen).

   is probably accurate, but unhelpful.

   It may meet lexicographical standards, but not encyclopedic ones. We can ask

   1. What is being imitated?

      I am assuming that ump imitates a transmitted or received dah, probably in the sense that pronouncing "ump-ty" is more likely to approximate the 3:1 length ratio that should exist in the transmitted or received sequence "dah-dit".

   2. What in the world connected it to the numeric meaning?

      I'm really shooting in the dark here: Are telegraphers that linguistically influential? If "ump-ump-ty-(t)ump, for instance, is or was used to coach novices and subordinates in sharpening up the timing in their transmission of the code for Q (dah-dah-di-dah), does that suggest either "umpty-ump" or "umpteen" as the (to a novice?) interminable length of the string of atoms necessary to send a useful msg? Is "umpty" just a (for telegraphers) familiar nonsense sound, associated (like yatta-yatta-yada) with interminability?

--Jerzy•t 10:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

The dash was "umpty", not "ump". The dot was "iddy".[1][2] Spacepotato (talk) 18:09, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

The -zillions and their kin

I demoted bazillion from the intro of the section, bcz it's only 1/3 as Googlish as gazillion. (And zillion is about 3 times what gazillion is.) I think it's ugly, annoying, and inefficient to have them listed in what is presumably the result of people adding their new entries at the head or foot of the list -- depending on individual social style, i'd guess. (The mind seeks, and if successful, exploits, the order in the list, even if unconsciously.) I think ordering according to declining frequency is the intuitive expectation, and if we aren't going to do that, the list following the intro should be alphabetical, just to avoid readers wasting time unconsciously testing other theories about the order. But i've left it for a while as i found it (except for the switch i've mentioned), in case seeing it in the existing order inspires someone to suss out some kind of pattern i'm missing.
If nothing else is suggested for a while, i'll do the Google checks to put it into declining-GTest order, in the belief that most readers will have some sense of the relative freqency of the top end, and will consider that order confirmed no later than the 4th entry.
--Jerzy•t 11:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it matters in this case, but using Google counts as a measure of popularity/validity/notability is not a good idea, because the counts are often problematic. Personally, I'd put them in alphabetical order.
- DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:53, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

• Indeed, "often problematic", but far better than nothing, and IMO thus good (unless you have another imperfect measure in mind) as long as we don't stake too much on the result (or encourage others to do so in situations where it'd be less appropriate).
  I think i'd oppose saying in the article anything even close to "listed in order of frequency of use". (But maybe that'd be good in a comment, to encourage adding others either at the bottom, or on the basis of the current GTest scores of the new one and the ones before and after it: i.e., document new entries' positions (in the comments or on the talk page). It could discourage the addition of any example more obscure than the most obscure existing one; IMO, that's worth discouraging.)
  --Jerzy•t 23:03, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
  

In fact (to follow up on myself), the more I think about it, the more I think alphabetical order is the way to go - largely because it will be transparent to the reader. These terms don't have natural ordering that is commonly understood (bazillion vs. gazillion?), so any other order will look like a random mishmash, which is what it looks like right now! if you're going to the effort to order them, I'd vote for "alphabetical order"
- DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:57, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

• I agree that alpha order (after the 1-to-a-handful in the first sentence, which i hope you don't object to) is fine, if any reasonable commenter (like yourself) continues to object to all attempts at approximating decreasing frequency.
  I unsure what you mean by "don't have natural ordering", and can see three interpretations, each of which i will respond to.

1. Order in the sense of smallest to largest in absolute meaning. I think authors can have the intention of giving a stronger impression of enormousness, but have little chance of succeeding. I think the real example from the page of "a million billion trillion zillion squillion dollars" succeeds relative to "a zillion dollars" only if the author was going for a strong impression of absurdity. IMO, there's no such thing as absolute-size order.
2. Order in the sense of smallest to largest in meaning relative to each other. If one kid says "I'm gonna make a gazillion dollars with my idea!", to top it, their buddy has to say something like "Mine is better, i'm gonna make a skillion umptillion dollars!", but if the first says "zillion", then "bazillion" feels more indefinitely large (bcz of the extra syllable) and "godzillion" might work for the third kid ('coz Godzilla rocks). (Cf. Ralphie in Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story, awed by IIRC a jump bid from a double dare to a triple dog dare.) Not a very useful kind of order, especially since subjectivity will be an important factor, and many of these words pretty clearly are equal or indistinguishably different.
3. Order in the sense of widely to obscurely familiar. The main difficulty here is IMO the enormous one of lack of a good corpus to judge by. Psychologists have trouble, i understand, when interested in how much the topic area affects the speed of recognition of words, agreeing on what to do about such situations as the relative infrequency of "kotex" (or "tampon", i suppose) in published works, despite the frequency with which shoppers pass grocery-store displays of a hundred copies of one or the other word. We learn the most frequent words of the language aurally before we can read, and know many others primarily from hearing and saying them; written sources may not reflect the same frequencies. I think there's a real order there, but we can only see it through a glass darkly.

As to the third kind, i'm encouraged abt that attempt, and i'd like to clarify why:

My immediate impression was that zillion and gazillion predominate. Bazillion strained my credulity much less than ananillion, robillion and julillion (of which at least the last two sound like efforts to feed the vanity of specific children related to the corresponding authors). Are you implying that you don't perceive those six as in anything but random order -- not even as a decreasing-frequency list that eventually degenerates into something indistinguishable from randomness? (That's what a successful decreasing-frequency list should feel like to nearly all readers, no?) The GTests on zillion, gazillion, and bazillion, and a couple or three more that i rated as the next more obscure candidates (but for me not clearly distinguishable in their levels of obscurity) offered me no surprises; that encouraged me that (based on a single-subject, non-blinded experiment!) i was on the right track.
And i want to emphasize again that while i'm talking abt what we do in the article, my goal is not to provide information on frequency rank (let alone frequency per se), but to present the information in the least distracting (let alone annoying) way. This is like eliminating passive voice and shortening sentences, not like verifying and inserting refs.

I hope colleagues will indulge me in the following exercise: i'm gonna go ahead and build the strictly GTest-ordered list, below on this talk page (and without trying to suggest that the effort won't be a waste bcz its use is inevitable: i just don't mind the very possibly wasted effort. I'll put the scores in the comments, so editors can scan the list for plausibility without being subliminally influenced by the scores, and report their reactions. (If you don't report, please look later and reconsider, since those who dislike it are probably more likely to report, producing systematic error.) FWIW, i'm going to post it outside my signed msg, so that anyone is free to convert the list into more of a controlled experiment if they like: will those who view it like it less, if a random entry from one half of the list is exchanged with the corresponding entry in the other half? Will they have an idea abt which pair have been exchanged?
--Jerzy•t 23:03, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

A straw man for us to beat on

Change it as seems useful to you.
--Jerzy•t 00:19, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

1. zillion
2. gazillion
3. bazillion
4. bajillion
5. squillion
6. kabillion
7. gajillion
8. skillion
9. kajillion
10. gagillion
11. gadzillion
12. hojillion
13. grillion
14. katrillion
15. godzillion
16. robillion
17. umptillion
18. gonillion
19. julillion
20. ananillion

Except for "zillion" - which had its own article for a while - none of these is common enough IMHO to require any handling other than the most obvious, which I think is alphabetical. It still seems to me that any other order will seem random to readers (and readers are the point, after all). - DavidWBrooks (talk) 00:46, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Somebody (not me) has gone and done it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 10:27, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Unreferenced new material in the "Umpteen" section

Like other articles on things that are in the folk culture, this article attracts additions by people who know, believe they know, or claim to know information that isn't yet in the article. Often these additions are valid and potentially valuable, but without a reference they can't go in the article, because there's no way for a reader to verify their validity. We don't accept material solely on the personal authority of editors.

Therefore, the two items below should be re-inserted in the article when, but not before, someone finds a good verifiable reference supporting them.

Incidentally, the American Heritage Dictionary, which is the source for its Morse Code origin, does not mention any of these alternate spellings, nor does it mention or have an entry for "umpty-ump." Dpbsmith (talk) 13:31, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

• Derived terms using the same root are umpty-ump and, rarely, umpty-tump.

• This word is often spelled umteen, umteem or umpteem

removed "x-mal"

I removed the reference to the german expression for umpteen. I don't see the special relevance of German here, and it was not correct anyway. "x-mal" is used more like "a gazillion times", as in "I told you…". More fitting would be "-zig", which is the ending for multiples of ten starting from 40 (vierzig). --Zar alex (talk) 14:43, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

• It might be interesting to have a view of the placeholder names in different languages (for numbers but also for people or places in the page Placeholder name). Spanish has "chorrocientos" (-cientos being the hundreds suffix), "mil millones" (thousand millions), "chuchonal" (in South America), either can be emphasised with prefixes like re-, recontra- (in Argentinian dialects) to imply even bigger numbers. Zillion is partially international, it's used in various languages (e.g. in Polish, spelt "zylion", and bazillion spelt "bazylion" though rarely used, more often you would say millions of millions or sometimes "dziesięćset" which is what the word for ten hundreds would be if it existed or "dziesięćdziesiąt", "dziesiętnaście" for ten tens and ten plus ten). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balrog-kun (talk • contribs) 12:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Several and few?

Surely several and 'a few' are indefinite numbers?

Relationshiip to wiktionary

I have added a link to wiktionary for bazillion. Since Wiktionary has its own citations should the one in wikipedia be removed or moved to wiktionary?

Propose that this is done for the other words in the list as well. Kwenchin (talk) 12:32, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

They could be copied to wiktionary but should be left here - we want to see citations/references here in WP, we shouldn't have to click through to another site (even a "sister" site like wiktionary) to see if they really exist. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 14:54, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Fictitious Fictitious numbers

Added 14 March 2007 julillion ananillion, gonillion by 142.157.197.158 at MCGILL UNIVERSITY References are fake. eg gonillion, publisher=Random House|year=1986}} ISBN 0-380-80632-0. p. 302: "The curtains had a gonillion dust particles on them, like grandmother's dentures." is ISBN-10: 0380806320 = "Woman to Woman: A Handbook for Women Newly Diagnosed with Breast Cancer (Paperback)" according to Amazon.

The others could not be found and the start of the ISBN numbers is not that usually used by the publishers named. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kwenchin (talk • contribs) 17:14, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Spazillion, Quazillion

An article in the Guardian uses spazillion (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/11/online-dating-soulmates) but could find few other users. One commenter says "Spazillion is a number between Bazillion and Quazillion." Quazillion is fairly popular but found no definition. Kwenchin (talk) 03:29, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

A little bit

could this be added to the list? I'm not sure because technically a bit is a binary digit and can be either zero or one, however when you add the qualifier "little" it gives it that uncertainty of being a placeholder name. Anyone agree? -- œ^™ 01:12, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

I went ahead and added "A bit" to the list. -- œ^™ 05:10, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Why only large amounts?

Well I'm glad to see "A bit" was left in after the rewrite :) but I'm still wondering why only the large number placeholder names are listed, what about words for small amounts? like "a tad" or "a smidgen". -- œ^™ 11:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Because nobody has added them yet? This is wikipedia, after all; somebody has to do it or it doesn't get done. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 13:17, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Shed-load

Would have thought the terms "a shed-load" and "shed-loads" were more common than around half the stuff in the "General Placeholder" list. Should it be added? F**k-ton (F**k-tonne) is also common but is probably too explicit to be included. -- 134.225.193.214 (talk) 13:33, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

"nth"

What about when someone says "nth", 'something to the 'nth power' as in n-th for an unspecific number? 216.227.115.137 (talk) 13:48, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Good point. There is a disambiguation page The Nth Degree which refers to this concept. It should be in here somewhere. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 14:00, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Edit request from 130.160.193.81, 4 October 2011

zachillion 130.160.193.81 (talk) 03:37, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Do you have a source for this edit? --Jnorton7558 (talk) 13:48, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Vulgar variants

Expressions such as crapload, shitload, fuckload, shitton etc. are clearly in general usage. Wikipedia is not censored, and a linguistic article like this should be descriptive when it purports to be so. Therefore, I don't understand why additions of these terms keep being reverted. I'm not particularly attached to these expressions and don't think adding them adds much, given that they are simply (emphatic) variants of already listed terms, but there is no real reason to remove them (only WP:IDONTLIKEIT), and while IP accounts adding them may act out of a juvenile disposition, they do not objectively engage in vandalism (and may equally well act in good faith) and therefore these edits should not be treated as such. To me, this is an issue of intellectual honesty, and keeping objective documentation and subjective taste separate, which is vital in an encyclopedic project. However, I would not object to extending the practice of requiring cites to the list of general placeholder names, or to requiring links to Wiktionary at least. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:30, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Examples in "placeholder names" list

I think we should limit the examples in the "general placeholder names" to only those with external examples - and not including a listing in Urban Dictionary, which is make-up-whatever-you-want territory.

This means getting rid of most of the list as it currently stands, forcing editors to find examples if they want to return them.

I this we should do this because right now there is no indication whether each word is legitimately used in the wild or just something that somebody heard - heck, even made up. Wikipedia lends credence, for better or worse, and it's not unreasaonble to expect that the credence be backed up by sources.

Any thoughts? - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:09, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

No response after a week. I'm going to delete all the non-good-referenced examples, then, and see what happens. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 19:51, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

New words!

I have some new words:

1. Catillion 2. Dogillion 3. Cowillion 4. Rabbitillion 5. Taoillion 6. Kongillion 7. Confucianillion 8. Wikillion 9. Laosillion 10. Bruneillion --68.103.31.159 (talk) 00:28, 9 March 2013 (UTC)