How many zeros are in a trillion?
A trillion has 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000. It is one thousand billion, or one million million, and is written as 10¹² in scientific notation.
In the short scale used in English-speaking countries, each new number name is a thousand times larger than the one before: thousand (3 zeros), million (6), billion (9) and trillion (12).
In countries that use the long scale, such as France, Germany, Spain and Türkiye, the word trillion means a much bigger number, a million million million, with 18 zeros. These countries use the word billion for 12 zeros. This difference can cause confusion in translations of economic news.
Trillions in the real world
National economies and debts are often measured in trillions of dollars. The metric prefix tera means one trillion, so a terabyte is about a trillion bytes of data.
To get a feel for the size, a trillion seconds is about 31,700 years, longer than all of recorded human history. A million seconds, by comparison, is less than 12 days.
Did You Know?
If you counted to a trillion at one number per second, it would take about 31,700 years.