Yahoo Answers is probably the only think Yahoo! has going for itself, yet the system is far from perfect. Many answers are wrong or retarded, but once the time has finished the Q/A are fixed and no new answers can be added. I stumbled across one that was wrong and here is the correct answer.
I was curious to see if a word for a set number of years beyond millennium existed, but it doesn't.
However, it does not mean new words cannot be made: the Latin word for year, annus, possess a suffix form -ennium for exactly this purpose. Actually, in Italian -enne is a commonly used as a suffix (on Italian numbers) to say "years old", eg. an undicenne is a 11-yo.
- Year
- biennium
- triennium
- quadriennium
- lustrum
- decade
- century
- millenium
- "decamillennium"
- "centimillennium"
- "millionennium"
- "billionennium"
- etc.
The catch is that all the -illion numbers do not exist in Latin and that their usage only was standardised recently whereas before there were two conflicting systems, called the long and short scale. We now solely use the latter, whereas remnants of the former are still present in some languages, in Italian, for example, billion is called
miliardo (trillion is
trilione). The word million is actually of Late Latin/early Italian origin and is the word thousand (
mille) with the augmentative suffix
-one (in Anglish they came up with the cool sounding "micklered"
, instead of calquing and getting "overthousand"), whereas the Romans and other folk simply would say a thousand thousand. It is rather weird to think that people used get along just fine without having the need to deal with large numbers... or possibly their denial of such need is the reason why the Roman empire's economy was a disaster.
