If you spell out all the offically recognised names for numbers in English (eg, 'one', 'two', 'three', 'fifty-eight thousand', 'million', but not rubbish like 'gazillion')...

what letters of the standard alphabet would remain unused?



Clue: there are two broad methods to help establish this, one of which involves repetitive tasks, whilst the other is based on etymological logic.

I'd approach this 'logically' - all numbers are going to be compilations of a small subset of number words - one to twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, hundred, thousand, million, billion.
I've eliminated the 'tens' that just have a y on the end, I don't need to worry about 'and' in large compound numbers as it's covered in 'thousand', but I don't know whether you are counting 'zero' as valid. (And if I thought about 0 too long, I could probably come up with a list of 'recognised names' to ask that question about...)

Now all I have to do is check each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet to see which are not used in my shortlist. Since I have decided unilaterally that zero is in the list (which makes your 'gazillion' a furphy, Mav ), I end up with the following unused letters:

cjkpq

Let me know how close I am. (And BTW yes, I have realised now I could have missed out half the teens from my shortlist as well!)

I considered gazillion to be a joke, but not all the -illions.

cjkpq

Octillion
Quintillion
sePtillion


... leaving J and K.

k

You're doing well guys! Before I comment further let me add that I unilaterally eliminate zero ;)

So does anyone have a more etymological approach, or can they find the clues in the above stages towards a solution...?

So does anyone have a more etymological approach

Well, you are a devil, aren't you, Maverick. ;

You're going to have my head all aclutter with this and I have a busy day ahead of me.

So what are you up to with this "etymological" angle?

Every one of the letters in "etymological" [all different except for "o" and "l"] are included. That's 10 with a remainder of 16. That does reduce the field of investigation a bit.

As for Bridget's "cjkpq" all I can think of is:

Cat Jumps Kitten Prances Qutely. :)
[A handy acronym, perhaps, if Bridget has the right answer. Hey, I'm rooting for you Bridget. Your logic is very impressive -- as always.]

> So does anyone have a more etymological approach

Well, our numbers are Latin when worded and not Greek, so 'k' seems like a good candidate as the Romans are not big on it. And 'j' was a pretty late addition to the alphabet, I think.

Bravo belli, that's getting there. So the final list of letters not found in the Latin-rooted names is...

In reply to:

---

If you spell out all the offically recognised names for numbers in English

---

VS.

In reply to:

---

let me add that I unilaterally eliminate zero ;)

---

Kindly make a choice between these two incompatible options, good sir. Either you want all, or you don't.

Is Skewes number not officially recognized?

nope, that'ud skew the results.

sheesh Vern, you gonna make me dig out my source material now?!

And the problem at looking at it from an etymological viewpoint, you eliminate the J alright, but there's no particular reason to eliminate the K from words of English origin.

> but there's no particular reason to eliminate the K from words of English origin.

Well no, but there's a rationlisation for eliminating them in the this case, right? Our numbers aren't really very native - as symbols, written or otherwise. As for leaving out zero/zilch/cipher an' what not... [shrug]

So the final list you want is .... J, K, & Z? Or wot, Mav?

- zero patience

> J, K, & Z

Looks a good answer to me, BY.

J, K, & Z

JKooZ - easy to remember, Maverick. :)

Sorry for delay, guys, I've been offline for a while...

FF, I for one am going to admit I had never heard of any of your 'illions' before this. Hence their non-inclusion in my process. I went away and looked them up in my Shorter Oxford (1969, inherited from grandparents)

Octillion
eighth power of a million, denoted by 1 followed by 48 ciphers. (in US, following later French usage, the ninth power of a thousand, denoted by one and 27 ciphers)

quintillion
a) in Britain, the fifth power of a million (1 followed by thirty ciphers)
b) in US (as in France) the cube of a million (1 followed by 18 ciphers)

septillion
the seventh power of a million, denoted by one followed by 32 ciphers. In American (following the later French use) the eighth power of a thousand, denoted by 1 followed by 24 ciphers.

This leads me to the following thoughts:
- just what is the logic behind the US/French way of assigning values to these words???
- in modern 'international' English, do these words have one standard accepted definition? Are they in fact used?
- (insert desperately-justifying-own-lack-of-knowledge-and-hence-not-using-them-in-proof emoticon here ) given obscurity/dual definitions, do they really qualify as 'officially recognised'?
- how bizarrely different the wording is of entries in the same dictionary for such closely related words!

Bravo belli, that's getting there. So the final list of letters not found in the [bold]Latin-rooted[/bold] names is...

Um, can I quote 'twenty' and 'hundred' as deriving from Old English rather than Latin? Let alone four, five, ten, eleven, twelve...
I'm pretty sure that in my 6 (?) years of Latin at school I never came across a word that included a 'w', yet on the basis of 'twenty' it needs to be eliminated.

Mav, I am really enjoying this mental exercise, but I think you should define your set of numbers!!!! 'Officially recognised' (whatever that may mean) or 'Latin-rooted'?

"just what is the logic behind the US/French way of assigning values to these words???"
I don't know that there is a logic. I first learned that there was a difference in high school, though I did not know which one had prior usage. Could be that we just plagiarized the French usage. I can guess that they figure that it was just logical to say that after a billion should come a trillion, quadrillion, and so on.


"- in modern 'international' English, do these words have one standard accepted definition? Are they in fact used?"
I heard them used a few times in high school and maybe middle school. For those of us who actually use numbers that big - and I have used numbers of that size and vastly larger for real problems - with a few exceptions, it is more common to use scientific notation, keeping only a few digits of precision. For example to express the constant known as the permittivity of free space, we would write 8.852 e-12, pronounced either as "eight point eight five two EE minus twelve" or as "eight point eight five two times ten to the minus twelve." The speed of light in a vacuum would be 3e8 m/s, or "three EE eight meters per second."

"- (insert desperately-justifying-own-lack-of-knowledge-and-hence-not-using-them-in-proof emoticon here ) given obscurity/dual definitions, do they really qualify as 'officially recognised'?"
I never thought about it.

"- how bizarrely different the wording is of entries in the same dictionary for such closely related words!"

indeed!

k

just what is the logic behind the US/French way of assigning values to these words???

I was taught that the US way is to increase the name by one rank for every three zeros and the British way is for every six zeros. Thus

1,000             is  one thousand US  vs  one thousand British
1,000,000         is  one million      vs  one million
1,000,000,000     is  one billion      vs  one thousand million
                                          (or "one milliard")
1,000,000,000,000 is  one trillion     vs  one billion
                                          (or "one million million")
10E15             is  one quadrillion  vs  one thousand billion
10E18             is  one quintillion  vs  one trillion
10E21             is  one sextillion   vs  one thousand trillion
10E24             is  one septillion   vs  one quadrillion
etc.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I'll never earn that much so I never looked past the thousand level. [sigh]

> Old English rather than Latin?

Another bloody troublemaker! These Australians, really.... ;)

I'll stand by my original question - yes, I reckon the *illions are officailly recognised (personally I'd say the US verzion now rules), yes I know the lower numbers have the OE roots, but then to work it out one needed to either iterate almost endlessly or figure the fact that larger numbers came from Latin and so would not contain...

and yes, wofa, you've got what I was taught too.

hah, think I'll go and lie down now :)

Oi, who you calling Australian?!? It's bad enough being abused as a Pom here (and having to justify our sports teams) without being shopped by the home country too...

But now that I have debunked your 'etymological logic' to my own satisfaction at least, can I just confirm that your final answer is J K and Z?

answer is J K and Z

If you accept his silly notion that zero doesn't count. And the annoying fact that, although the K is eliminated on Latin grounds it is not eliminated on English grounds. Just because there is no K in any of the English roots does not mean that it could not, in theory, be there.

And as far as eliminating J for etymological reasons, if J is eliminated because it is a recent variation of I, then U is eliminated because it is a recent variation of V, so eliminating J on etymological grounds is invalid.