What is a Googol?

It’s a really B...I...G number. A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros. (In comparison, a billion is pretty small. A billion is a 1 followed by 9 zeros.) The word googol was made up by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta in 1920. Milton’s uncle was a math expert. He asked Milton what to call this huge number. Milton came up with googol! The search engine Google was named after a googol, but it was spelled differently.

A googolplex is a 1 followed by a googol zeros. At first, Milton suggested that a googolplex could be 1 followed by the number of zeros a person could write until they got tired. His uncle thought it would be better to define the number more precisely though.