googol

Is googol a number any actual layperson has ever needed to use?

Cosmologists have calculated that we will reach this cosmic dead end—in which time itself ceases, as physics writer George Musser points out—in one googol years.

He added: "The major did plump for googol and of course the rest was history, he'd won the one million pounds on the evening."

When the internet company was founded in 1998, it based its name on the mathematical term “googol,” which refers to the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

In August 1996, Backrub became Google, a play on the term googol, meaning the large number 10 to the power of 100.