Googol the Number

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What is a googol?

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

Say that again?

A googol is a number that is represented by a one followed by one hundred (100) zeros. Please count the zeros above to make sure that I got exactly 100 of them!

It is perhaps easier to think of a googol as 10 to the power of one hundred.

Where did the name googol come from?

Mathematician Edward Kasner, author of Mathematics and the Imagination, came up with the term at the suggestion of his nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta (and with input from Milton's brother Edwin) in the late 1930s.

How big is a googol?

Big. In comparison to a googol's one followed by one hundred zeros, a trillion only has twelve zeros. One googol is more than the number of atoms in the visible universe.

Is "googol" the same as "Google"?

Well, no. A google is a number, and Google is a company (not to mention a Web search destination). However, the number googol was the inspiration for the Googol company name. Probably, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were Computer Science graduate students at Stanford at the time the company was founded, were looking for a name that said "large." Googol fits that bill. But maybe they thought "googol" sounded like a cookie, or something a nine-year old would say, or a Russian novelist. In any case, "Google" it was, and the rest is history.

Is there a number that is a one followed by a googol zeros?

It is called a "googolgplex." I won't try to write all those zeros out! See our Googolplex FAQ.