This week’s theme
Coined words

This week’s words
misogynoir
outgrabe
intertextuality
genteelism
googolplex

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(GOO-guhl-pleks)

MEANING:

noun: The number 1 followed by a googol number of zeros.

ETYMOLOGY:

Coined by Milton Sirotta (1911-1981), nine-year-old nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner. From googol + -plex as in duplex. Earliest documented use: 1937.

NOTES:

Googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros (10¹⁰⁰). Googolplex is (10^googol or 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰). It’s so big that it’s not even possible to spell it out in long form (1000000000...). We would fill the whole universe before we come even close to writing out the number. It is even bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. So what is such a number good for? It’s often used in a hyperbolic sense to signify an incredibly large quantity of something -- far beyond anything we could actually count or imagine. Also see, google.

USAGE:

“So while the rest of the class did sprint drills, I did upper-body work (translation: a googolplex of push-ups).”
Brett A. Halbleib; Training Day; Indianapolis Star (Indiana); Jul 1, 2007.

“Trump was booked in Georgia for one of his googolplex of criminal cases.”
Mike Freeman; Trump Sneakers Aren’t Going to Sway Black Americans; USA Today (McLean, Virginia); Feb 26, 2024.

See more usage examples of googolplex in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: