Mathematics is the most rigorous branch of knowledge. But leave it to people — and language — to make even maths folksy. (Maths is the British informal term for mathematics. Isn’t it nice? It preserves the final ‘s’, unlike the American short form, math.) Certainly languages provide names for rigorous, card-carrying numbers like the cardinals, e.g., million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, and so on. But look who snuck in there as well: zillion, gazillion, bazillion and probably a few others. Why a zillion? Why not a pillion? And is there a rough ordering of size going on, or not? Is a bazillion bucks more than a gazillion? They’re probably both bigger than a zillion, but is that just “prefix prejudice” entering the picture here? 🙂

We also have the precise quantities for groups: pair, sextet, dozen, score. And even when things get vaguer, some of the terms still maintain an air of numeral dignity: multitude, numerous, plenitude, abundance, profusion. Then it gets casual fast: lots, bunches, scads and oodles. So, can oodles of dollars be more than a bazillion dollars?

Bazillion and its ilk are phony cardinal numbers (they also have their fake ordinal cousins, as in bazillionth, gazillionth, etc. “I’ve told you for the gazillionth time to save your files!”), whereas oodles and scads are slangy quantifiers, which most languages possess, well, scads of.