What is a google / googol?

The famous web search engine Google took its name from the maths word 'googol'. But what does it mean? Well, just like words such as 'four,' 'pi,' 'six thousand' and 'one hundred and thirty billion,' 'one googol' is a number. Specifically, the word 'googol' belongs in the same family as hundred, thousand, million, billion and so on: it is a power of ten. What's a power of 10? That's a bigger question for another post (please ask us to get going on it if you really want to know!), but a quick recap: Powers tell you how many times to multiply a number by itself (for example, 5³ means 5 x 5 x 5). A power of 10 is just the number ten 'raised to a power' (for example, 10⁴ is read as "ten to the power of 4," and means 10 x 10 x 10 x 10, which is ten thousand (10,000)). So what's a googol? A googol is

• "ten to the power of one hundred," or
• 10¹⁰⁰, which means:

10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10

• Which equals:

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 quite big.