People seem to love words that give a sense of size, terms like ‘umpteen’ and ‘zillion’. These terms are referred to as ‘indefinite hyperbolic numbers’ – ‘indefinite’ because they do not represent actual numbers, and ‘hyperbolic’ because they are used to imply a larger size than the reality. What’s interesting is that everyone roughly agrees on the size these vague terms refer to, and that is because there are language models that underpin the terms and allow a general understanding of their meaning. For example, the word ‘umpteen’ has a generally agreed meaning of ‘big, but not bigger than a hundred’, using the language model ‘-teen’ from the two-digit numbers thirteen to nineteen. And the indefinite hyperbolics ‘gazillion’ and ‘bazillion’ use ‘ga’ and ‘ba’ as intensifiers to the root word ‘zillion’ (itself an indefinite hyperbolic) to suggest a number more than a billion or even than a zillion!