The short answer

One million is written 1,000,000 — a one followed by six zeros. Grouped in the usual way, that's three zeros for the "thousands" and three more for the "millions." In numbers it's 10⁶, and in plain words it's a thousand thousands. That's the same in every English-speaking country and in finance — unlike "billion," which, as it turns out, hasn't always meant the same thing.

What a million feels like

We say "a million" so casually that the size slips past us. Here's a fix that sticks: if you counted one number every second, without sleeping or stopping, reaching a million would take about eleven and a half days. A million dollars in $100 bills is a stack roughly a metre tall and weighs about 10 kg — heavy, but you could carry it. The number is big, but it's still a human big; you can hold it in your head.

Which sets up the classic gag about wealth: "What's the quickest way to make a million? Start with two million and buy an airline." The joke only lands because we can just about feel the loss — a million is large enough to matter and small enough to picture. Hold onto that feeling, because a billion will quietly break it.

The word & the first millionaire

"Million" arrived in English in the late Middle Ages from the Italian millione — literally a "great thousand" — because before it, the biggest everyday number word was simply "a thousand," and merchants doing ever-larger sums needed something bigger. The word "millionaire" came later, coined in French around the 1700s during an era of spectacular speculative fortunes, and stayed rare and dazzling for another century.

The man usually called America's first millionaire is John Jacob Astor (1763–1848), a butcher's son from Germany who built a fortune in the fur trade and then in Manhattan real estate. When he died in 1848 he was the richest person in the United States, leaving an estate of around $20 million — a sum equal to nearly 1% of the entire US economy, which would be well over $100 billion in today's money. Back then, being "a millionaire" was as remarkable as being a billionaire is now.

What we count in millions

A million is the natural unit for "a real crowd." It's the population of a decent-sized city, the streams that earn a song a milestone, the downloads that mark a hit app. In music, a platinum record is one million sales, and the best-selling single of all time — Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" — has sold somewhere around 50 million physical copies over the decades. A blockbuster novel selling "millions of copies" is a career; a video with a million views is a small success.

That's the giveaway: a million is where "lots" becomes a number you can still reason about. It's only when we step up to a billion — a thousand of these already-huge millions — that human intuition simply gives up.

The last number we can really feel

A million sits right at the edge of human intuition. Six zeros is about as far as the mind can stretch and still picture the thing — a packed stadium fifteen times over, eleven days of counting, a metre of cash. Push one digit further and the picture collapses; that's why "millionaire" stood for the summit of wealth for two centuries before the world even needed the word "billionaire."

So six zeros is the honest answer — but the more interesting fact is that a million is the biggest number most of us can truly hold in our heads. See what happens when you add three more zeros: how many zeros are in a billion.

Common questions

Quiz: a million facts

Five quick rounds on the number, the word and the first millionaire.

Facts & sources

More big numbers