quintillion
/kwɪnˈtɪljən
/cardinal number (plural quintillions or (with numeral) same)
1A thousand raised to the power of six (1018).A pair of flies beginning operation in April, if all were to live, would result in 191,010,000,000,000,000,000 (191 quintillion, 10 quadrillion) flies by August....
- The mass of the earth has been estimated to be 6 sextillion, 588 quintillion tons.
- At present, the planet holds more than a quintillion tons of the world's most essential resource, which can be found everywhere from the pulpy interior of desert cacti to tropical cloud canopies.
1.1 dated, chiefly British A million raised to the power of five (1030).
Derivatives
quintillionth
- Essentially, the corona rips open and blasts as much as 100 billion tons of material into space - equivalent to 100,000 battleships (but less than 46 quintillionths of the mass of the Sun).
- Created by scattering x rays off of water, the movies show electrons sloshing in water molecules, and each frame lasts just 4 attoseconds (quintillionths of a second).
- Scanning the pulse delay, they recorded a movie of surface plasmon fields at 330 attoseconds (quintillionths of a second) per frame.
Origin
Late 17th century: from French, from million, by substitution of the prefix quinti- 'five' (from Latin quintus 'fifth') for the initial letters.