Meanings
- UKrareA thousand million, proposed as an alternative to the (now little used) British milliard and the (ambiguous, in the UK) US billion.
1 more example
The internationally agreed symbol for 10^6 is M and this is the initial letter of million. Would it not be logical and convenient to turn this happy accident into a principle and use G, the internationally agreed symbol for 10^9, as the initial letter of the word for 1,000,000,000? That number would thus be called a gillion. Whether the g should be hard or soft is a matter of opinion. I incline to hard because of the derivation from giga.
1968, N. W. Pirie, More About the Units (Nature vol. 220)
plural gillions
- excessiveslangAn unspecified large number (of).
At Guy's school there had been an outdoor pool, in use from April to October, a watery grave for a billion insects, or quite possibly a gillion or a squillion. The bright turquoise lining had wrinkled under the children's feet.
2012, Rebecca Smith, A Bit of Earth1 more example
I looked down to see my dog, Roof, short for Rufus, curled in sleep below the window, unworried by the wings of hummingbirds whirring at speeds of a gillion miles an hour as they flitted in and out of the trumpets of honeysuckle growing on the side of the house.
2022, Frank Voss, My House Was Not a Home
Synonyms & antonyms
Origin
Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with gillion
Sounds the same
Cite this entry
gillion. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gillion
“gillion.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gillion. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “gillion,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gillion.
Source: gillion on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.