million
/ˈmɪljən
/- Nearly half a million people could benefit from a new scheme aimed at reducing hospital waiting lists.
- Between them they will buy more than a million tickets for thousands of shows.
- In this way, it is estimated that some half a million people will be pushed off benefits.
- It also includes money, in the millions and billions.
- Before European settlers arrived, gray wolves once roamed all over North America, their population in the millions.
- It has cost that state multiple millions of dollars.
- Although the discrepancy may not look large, it is likely to represent very significant sums of money when multiplied by millions of customers.
- Multiply that by millions of digital photographers and you are talking about a lot of digital information.
- Influenza, whose genes evolve a million times faster than ours, is a master of adaptability.
- Suddenly it's nearly Christmas and I still have a million and one things to do.
- I have no idea where she is or what she's doing, and my mind is running at a million miles an hour.
- They stand to lose millions in revenue following the discovery of one infected cow in Alberta in May this year.
- Didn't they invest a few million into the company a few years ago?
- I ran into a group of people who will pay big money - millions - to the person who solves their one problem.
Phrases
gone a million
look (or feel) (like) a million dollars
Derivatives
millionfold
/ adjective & adverb ...- The end result is that when the intensity is increased a millionfold we perceive the loudness to have increased by a factor of twelve.
- It may drive us mad if we begin to think of public evils as millionfold evils.
- By the turn of the eighteenth century, that estimate stood at 20,000,000,000 Earth radii - a millionfold increase.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French, probably from Italian milione, from mille 'thousand' + the augmentative suffix -one.
In Latin mille means ‘a thousand’—as in mile and millennium (mid 17th century). In million, the thousand got multiplied by itself. This seems to have happened in Italian, where the word millione (now milione) was formed. In 1956 Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm enjoyed great success with the duet ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ from Cole Porter's High Society. The answer in the song is ‘I don't’, but the television company ITV found that they were in a small minority when they introduced the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in September 1998. Thousands have applied to be contestants and millions have been won; the show has given several catchphrases to the language, including ‘phone a friend’ and ‘ is that your final answer?’ The top prize in the British show is a million pounds, but the first millionaires had a thousand French francs. The poet Lord Byron wrote in a letter in 1816: ‘He is still worth at least 50-000 pds—being what is called here a “Millionaire” that is in Francs and such Lilliputian coinage, introducing the word to English.’