How to Use quintillion in a Sentence

quintillion

noun
Definition of quintillionnext
  • Over a billion years, that could have led to 1 quintillion lightning strikes -- and a lot of phosphorus.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 16 Mar. 2021
  • Like it or not, though, you're surrounded—there are about 10 quintillion on Earth, including about 10 quadrillion ants.
    — Liz Langley, National Geographic, 26 Nov. 2016
  • There is indeed quite a bit of it – about 7.5 quintillion grains on Earth’s beaches and deserts, according to one estimate.
    — Eoin O'Carroll, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 Sep. 2017
  • Your chances of filling out a perfect bracket are like 1 in 9.2 quintillion (yes, that's an actual number), so don't sweat it out too much.
    — Cheryl Wray, AL.com, 12 Mar. 2018
  • The emergence of the Earth’s first living organisms billions of years ago may have been facilitated by a bolt out of the blue — or perhaps a quintillion of them.
    — NBC News, 16 Mar. 2021
  • Those terms are the equivalent of a quadrillion terabytes and a quintillion terabytes, respectively.
    — Mike Snider, USA TODAY, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Instead, the death of the last star marks the beginning of the degenerate era, the epoch of our universe that will occupy quintillions of years (each quintillion is a billion billion years).
    — Popular Mechanics, 7 Mar. 2023
  • As of mid-April, miners were making more than 170 quintillion attempts a second to produce new blocks, according to the trading platform Blockchain.com.
    — Star Tribune, 15 Apr. 2021
  • There are 43 quintillion potential ways to arrange the squares but only one solution.
    — Roni Dengler, Discover Magazine, 19 July 2019
  • The story of a guy who wouldn't let a few quintillion possible decryption keys stand between him and his cryptocurrency.
    — Lily Hay Newman, Wired, 6 Aug. 2020
  • According to the release, DNA testing showed the samples were 25 quintillion times more likely to have come from Hoff than the general population, police said.
    — NBC News, 20 Nov. 2021
  • Insects are nothing if not abundant; according to some estimates, there are as many as 10 quintillion insects alive at any one moment.
    — Discover Magazine, 29 June 2010
  • The upper range was about a quintillion lightning strikes and the formation of upwards of 1 billion fulgurites annually.
    — NBC News, 16 Mar. 2021
  • The rapid pulse of text messages will be braided with the slow texts of books, the heartbeats of humans synced with the oscillations of machines, the electricity of 80 quintillion transistors merging with the electricity of 7 billion people.
    — Kevin Kelly, WIRED, 16 Apr. 2013
  • Businesses are being overcome by an avalanche of data, with some estimates pointing to creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day.
    — Sanjit Singh Dang, Forbes, 18 Oct. 2021
  • The facilities paused normal operations and delayed other research to allow the global telescope to come alive in search of radio waves from a ring of light encircling the shadow of a black hole more than 300 quintillion miles away.
    — Adam Glanzman, Smithsonian, 19 Nov. 2019
  • This year the lab unveiled Frontier, a system capable of over one quintillion calculations per second—the fastest in the world, according to the supercomputer ranking project Top500.
    — Emily Bobrow, WSJ, 2 Dec. 2022
  • The analyst testified the chances of the blood not being Prothro’s were astronomical, one in several quintillion.
    — Annie Sciacca, The Mercury News, 9 Sep. 2019
  • There is the painstaking work of taxonomists who continue to catalogue the earth's estimated 10 quintillion insects; the Greek island beekeepers; and the Zika-fighting mosquitoes in Brazil.
    — Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American, 1 July 2017
  • There is the painstaking work of taxonomists who continue to catalogue the earth's estimated 10 quintillion insects; the Greek island beekeepers; and the Zika-fighting mosquitoes in Brazil.
    — Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American, 3 July 2017
  • With many millions of insect species (only about a million of which have been named) and 10 quintillion individuals, the world is literally crawling and buzzing with possibilities.
    — Greg Miller, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Dec. 2021
  • The gravitational era that begins around 15 trillion years from now could continue for quintillion years and beyond, Laughlin estimates.
    — NBC News, 20 Dec. 2017
  • The famously frustrating, 3-D puzzle (with six colored sides and nine squares per side) has more than 43 quintillion possible combinations but only one solution.
    — David Martindale, star-telegram.com, 7 June 2017
  • Astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham puts the number at 100 quintillion.
    — Rob Verger, Popular Science, 1 Oct. 2019
  • Their result complements laboratory measurements of the constant using atomic clocks that achieve precision in the parts per quintillion (1018), but those are limited to earthly settings.
    — Sophia Chen, WIRED, 9 Dec. 2022
  • By that point, supercomputers should be capable of running a quintillion (10^18) calculations per second, which is what will be necessary for these first simulations.
    — David Kushner, Discover Magazine, 4 Dec. 2014
  • Under most circumstances, researchers would need to subject an object to ludicrous accelerations—upward of 25 quintillion times the force of Earth’s gravity—in order to produce a measurable emission.
    — Joanna Thompson, Scientific American, 20 May 2022
  • The machine was said to be capable of generating almost 159 quintillion permutations.
    — New York Times, 5 June 2019
  • Every day, about 2.5 quintillion bytes of unstructured consumer data are generated.
    — Elizabeth Shaw, Forbes, 29 Jan. 2022
  • But several exaflop computers, which will exceed one quintillion operations per second, are already under construction that rely on chips from AMD and Intel.
    — Aaron Pressman, Fortune, 23 June 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'quintillion.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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