How many zeroes in a Million, Billion, Trillion, Nonillion, Quadrillion, Sextillion, Googol

The actual importance of zero is known once we begin to work with large numbers. The bigger the number, the more number of zeros it contains. So it gets difficult to count the numbers containing zeros, as it gets larger and larger. There’s a method of computing the large numbers containing zeros. This method is helpful for easy reference to figure out the name of zeroes in a large number.

Now starting with the numbers having a small number of zeros, Tens, Hundreds and thousands have their names. But as we go to the next level of number, another zero is added. Each time as we move on to the following number, one more zero gets added to it. But when we move from one number to next designation, the number of zeros added to the number increases by more than one.

Let us say that we know there are three zeros in one thousand,  i.e. 1000. It was quite easy to figure it out here. But if we talk about one million, there are six zeros in it, i.e. 1000000 but it is quite challenging to remember the number of zeros in every next level of large numbers. So here we employ the method of grouping three zeros together. For example, in one million, if we use commas to group three zeros together, it makes the task of counting zeros easier.

Remember that the set of three starts as you move towards the left of a decimal point. Now one million can be written using commas as- 1,000,000. Here in this example, we see that after using the commas, we can count the group of three zeros and easily remember the total number of zeros in this number, i.e. groups of three zeros here is 2. And here two multiplied by three zeros is 6 zeros in total, which is the total amount of zeros in one million.

With this method itself, we can now count large numbers quickly. Below is a table showing the number of zeros at every next level of designation.

Everywhere in the world, one billion is equal to 1,000 million is known.

Now there is a term “googol”( given by Milton Sirotta). Googol has a hundred zeros in it. It is one of the large numbers. Here we notice that ‘googol’ somewhat matches with the term “Google”. But the actual mystery behind it is that the word “google” has been misspelt instead of googol. It should have been “Googol” only; as it one of the large numbers and google being one of the largest search engines in the world.