What Comes After Trillion? the Ultimate Large Numbers Cheat Sheet from Quadrillion to Googolplex
By James H. Sterling
In standard English counting systems, the next named order of magnitude after one trillion is one quadrillion.
To visualize the transition, observe the zeros. One trillion is written as 1,000,000,000,000 ($10^{12}$). If you add one unit, you get one trillion and one. But when advancing by standard three-zero linguistic jumps, multiplying one trillion by one thousand yields 1,000,000,000,000,000 ($10^{15}$). That is a quadrillion.
1,000 = One Thousand (3 zeros, 10³)
1,000,000 = One Million (6 zeros, 10⁶)
1,000,000,000 = One Billion (9 zeros, 10⁹)
1,000,000,000,000 = One Trillion (12 zeros, 10¹²)
1,000,000,000,000,000 = One Quadrillion (15 zeros, 10¹⁵)
Quadrillions already exist in daily measurement, even if corporate quarterly earnings haven't reached them. Supercomputing benchmarks rely on "petaFLOPs", quadrillions of floating-point operations per second. Modern exascale supercomputers run past one quintillion operations each second. In atmospheric science, Earth's total biomass contains an estimated quadrillion ants, whose combined weight rivals total human mass.
James Sterling reports on renewable energy developments, climate policy, ecological conservation, and green tech innovations around the globe.
