Googol

Not to be confused with the company Google or the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol.

A googol is a unit of measurement. It is equal to ten duotrigintillion (10,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000) of something. The number of the same name is also known as ten thousand sexdecillion.^[1][2]

The number ten duotrigintillion is a big number, as illustrated here.

A 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, first used the word "googol". Sirotta made this word in 1937, for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.^[3]He may have been inspired by the comic strip character Barney Google.

The company Google was named after the number "googol". Its creators originally called it BackRub because it used backlinks to tell how important each page was. Someone suggested "googolplex". They shortened it to "googol" and then spelled the word wrong when looking for a domain name that was not yet taken.^[4]

Related pages

• Graham's number
• Googolplex, which is 10^googol