You've heard of a million. Maybe a billion. But have you ever heard of a googol?
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. Written out, it looks like this:
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
That's not a typo. That's one single number — and your brain isn't really built to feel how big it is. So here's a comparison that might help.
Bigger than the universe
Scientists estimate there are around 10⁸² atoms in the entire observable universe — every star, every planet, every grain of sand on every beach, everywhere. That number has 82 zeros.
A googol has 100. Which means a googol is larger than the total number of atoms in existence. There isn't enough stuff in the universe to count up to a googol, even if every atom were a counting token.
And then there's a googolplex
A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol of zeros. It's so large that there isn't enough space in the observable universe to even write it down — the number of digits needed exceeds the number of atoms available to print them on.
The nine-year-old
The name "googol" was coined in 1920 by a nine-year-old boy named Milton Sirotta, when his mathematician uncle asked him to invent a name for a really big number.
Years later, the founders of a small search engine liked the word so much they named their company after it — with a slight spelling change. You might know it as Google.