Million

One million is a number that is represented as 1,000,000, 10⁶, or in scientific notation, 1 × 10⁶. It is the natural number that comes after 999,999 and before 1,000,001.

It is commonly used as a placeholder for any large number, or when someone wants to exaggerate something. For example, someone may say "I wish I had a million dollars" or "I've got a million problems today."

In the first example, a million dollars is a lot of money to most people, so when someone says that, they may not specifically mean that they want exactly 1 million dollars, just that they wish they had a lot of money.

In the second example, it is highly unlikely that the person actually has 1 million problems; they likely are just trying to communicate that they're having a very bad day. In either case, a million is being used because it is a very difficult number to conceptualize.

How big is a million?

While it isn't impossible to count to 1 million, it would require a lot of concentration, and would take a long enough time that most people probably wouldn't attempt it. If you were to count 1 number per second, it would take 1,000,000 seconds to count to 1 million. In reality, it would likely take longer than this, since it will take longer to count larger numbers. For example, 904,567 is read as "nine-hundred four thousand, five hundred and sixty-seven." That may take you more than 1 second to read, let alone keep track of while counting. However, assuming that we could do it in 1 second, 1 million seconds is still difficult to comprehend in terms of time, but we can break it down to make it easier.