How big is a million? Bees, salt grains, fingers and eleven days
A million seconds lasts about 11.57 days. A million grains of table salt fit in roughly 64 millilitres, and a million honey bees weigh about as much as one 80-kilogram adult. Picturing a million becomes far easier once it is broken down into squares and cubes.
The word comes from early Italian millione, built from mille, thousand, plus an augmentative ending. It is the square of 1000 and the cube of 100, and the SI prefix mega stands for it, as in a megawatt. Unlike bigger numbers, million means the same thing on both the short and long scales, and in Indian and Pakistani English it is also 10 lakh, from the Sanskrit word for 100,000.
Squares help with area: a grid a thousand units on a side holds a million of them, so under three square yards of window screen can contain a million holes, and a city lot of 70 by 100 feet covers about a million square inches. Cubes help with volume: a cube a hundred grains on each edge holds those million salt grains, and a small room measuring 8 and a third feet in every direction encloses a million cubic inches.
Lengths work too. A kilometre is a million millimetres, and a car tyre might turn a million times on a trip of 1,900 kilometres. A million fingers, each 22 millimetres wide, would stretch 22 kilometres, about five and a half hours of walking at 4 kilometres an hour. Roughly a million characters fill 136 pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Money offers a neat equivalence: every US dollar bill weighs 1 gram, so a million of them weigh a tonne, just as a cubic metre of water does. Among the seven-digit numbers that follow, the smallest prime is 1,000,003, and 1,048,576 counts the bytes in a mebibyte.
Source: 1,000,000
