As the scale of science expands, so does the language of prefixes

NOWADAYS EVERY manufacturing facility appears to be a “gigafactory”. Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, not too long ago lower the ribbon on a fourth facility by that identify, in Berlin. Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory has been within the information for a covid-related halt in manufacturing. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm (TSMC), one of many world’s most vital chipmakers, has begun touting its “gigafabs”. Nissan has introduced a gigafactory in Sunderland, within the north-east of England.

Giga- is a prefix that means “a billion” of one thing. The Oxford English Dictionary drily describes it as an “arbitrary spinoff” of the Greek gigas, “large”. (The traditional Greeks apparently had no want for a selected phrase for “billions”.) However the numerous gigafactories don’t at all times produce billions of something: every month the TSMC gigafab can begin about 100,000 silicon wafers used for making microchips, making it extra of a hectokilofactory. (Hekaton and khilioi actually are Greek for 100 and 1,000.) Tesla, at the least, can declare that its unique Gigafactory in Nevada provides billions of watt-hours of battery-cell output per yr.

As science has expanded to the massive and the tiny, the necessity for brand spanking new metric-system prefixes has grown accordingly. These have made their approach into frequent parlance principally by computing. Within the Eighties a superb laptop may need had 256 kilobytes of reminiscence. The primary arduous drives with one million bytes’ price of storage launched the world to the megabyte, a jaw-dropping notion on the time. (Megas, too, was generic in Greek, that means “nice”. A megalomaniac has delusions of greatness, not millionaire standing.) However at the least many individuals had heard of the mega- prefix earlier than. When the billion-byte mark was crossed, many started encountering “giga-” for the primary time, unusual new linguistic territory opened up by Moore’s Legislation.

It may be solely a matter of time earlier than giga- feels ho-hum; in spite of everything, a reminiscence card with 128 gigabytes of storage is in the present day the dimensions of a thumbnail and prices round $20. Reasonably priced arduous drives now have terabyte—that's, trillion-byte—storage. Having run out of phrases for “massive”, the debtors from Greek obtained inventive: teras means “monster”. As billions turn into workaday, tera- will turn into the brand new giga-.

For some time, anyway. Whether or not or not computing energy continues to develop on the charge it has prior to now—a matter of some debate—it's inevitable that peta- and exa- will make their debut within the widespread consciousness. Already chosen by the Worldwide Committee for Weights and Measures (ICWM), peta- and exa- come from Greek penta (5) and hexa (six), representing 1,000⁵ and 1,000⁶. After that, the ICWM’s prefix-mongers have determined to go for Latin reasonably than Greek. They thought-about septa- and octo- for 1,000⁷ and 1,000⁸. However the proposed s- shortening of septa- might have been confused with an abbreviation for a second, and the o- for a zero. So septa- and octo- had been deformed to zetta- (1,000⁷) and yotta- (1,000⁸).

Because the system of prefixes can now embody a 1 adopted by 24 zeroes, most scientists will likely be comfortable to make use of 10²⁵ and the like for something larger. However not faculty college students: a gaggle on the College of California, Davis, began a petition proposing a brand new prefix, hella-, for 10²⁷. Northern Californians will know hella as an adverb, derived from hell of, as in “he’s hella ugly.” And as a prefix, it has gained a little bit of foreign money within the expertise press, if solely jokingly. It might be the primary of the prefixes for enormous numbers to not come from the classical languages. “Hell” is a Germanic phrase.

Small is cool too. The fractional equal of giga- is nano-, the prefix denoting a billionth. Nanotechnology is massive, so to talk: nanoparticles making up nanobeads are sizzling matters in science and expertise. The hip really feel conveyed by the prefix was borrowed by Apple, which named its tiny music participant the Nano. (Once more, the etymology is classical: nanos is the Greek phrase for “dwarf”.) If nano-, too, ultimately turns into humdrum, look out for pico- (a trillionth, from Spanish pico for “somewhat bit”), femto- and atto-, from the Danish for 15 and 18, referring to 10¹⁵ and 10¹⁸.

Classicists as soon as scoffed at phrases, comparable to “tv” and “monolingual”, which combine up Greek and Latin roots. Now they're obliged to behold gigafactories and decacorns (personal firms which are price over $10bn), nanoseconds and terawatts, to say nothing of hellabytes. These could seem ungainly, however the Hellenophiles can console themselves that the chimera—an unlikely mixture of lion, goat and snake—was, in spite of everything, a Greek beast.

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A information to renamed cities (Mar twenty sixth)
Guidelines for educating grammar in colleges (Mar twelfth)
A language with out a flag and a state continues to be a language (Feb twelfth)