How to Use quintillion in a Sentence

quintillion

noun
  • That’s more than nine quintillion!
    — Emma R. Hasson, Scientific American, 19 Mar. 2026
  • Over a billion years, that could have led to 1 quintillion lightning strikes -- and a lot of phosphorus.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 16 Mar. 2021
  • This is equal to one quintillion floating point operations per second.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 23 Oct. 2025
  • But even on the standard three-by-three cube, the colors can be arranged in more than 43 quintillion different ways.
    — Christian Thorsberg, Smithsonian Magazine, 29 May 2024
  • That’s an amazing thing—taking the temperature of an object that can be quintillions of kilometers away!
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 5 July 2024
  • Those terms are the equivalent of a quadrillion terabytes and a quintillion terabytes, respectively.
    — Mike Snider, USA TODAY, 22 Nov. 2022
  • There are 43 quintillion potential ways to arrange the squares but only one solution.
    — Roni Dengler, Discover Magazine, 19 July 2019
  • The story of a guy who wouldn't let a few quintillion possible decryption keys stand between him and his cryptocurrency.
    — Lily Hay Newman, Wired, 6 Aug. 2020
  • The algorithm could create as many as 52 quintillion permutations of the film.
    — Brian Welk, IndieWire, 21 Nov. 2024
  • Like it or not, though, you're surrounded—there are about 10 quintillion on Earth, including about 10 quadrillion ants.
    — Liz Langley, National Geographic, 26 Nov. 2016
  • Insects are nothing if not abundant; according to some estimates, there are as many as 10 quintillion insects alive at any one moment.
    — Discover Magazine, 29 June 2010
  • The emergence of the Earth’s first living organisms billions of years ago may have been facilitated by a bolt out of the blue — or perhaps a quintillion of them.
    — NBC News, 16 Mar. 2021
  • The upper range was about a quintillion lightning strikes and the formation of upwards of 1 billion fulgurites annually.
    — NBC News, 16 Mar. 2021
  • Instead, the death of the last star marks the beginning of the degenerate era, the epoch of our universe that will occupy quintillions of years (each quintillion is a billion billion years).
    — Popular Mechanics, 7 Mar. 2023
  • For an 8×8 grid of pulses, the number of possible input patterns is 264, or about 10 quintillion.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 19 Oct. 2025
  • The $10 quintillion figure is based on the value of the asteroid's potential bounty if it were transported back to Earth and somehow mined.
    — Matt Robison, Newsweek, 21 Nov. 2024
  • The system is the first exascale supercomputer for open science, capable of more than one quintillion calculations per second.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 28 Jan. 2026
  • Aurora can perform a quintillion calculations per second.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 4 Mar. 2026
  • The analyst testified the chances of the blood not being Prothro’s were astronomical, one in several quintillion.
    — Annie Sciacca, The Mercury News, 9 Sep. 2019
  • One over-the-counter container of Narcan contains molecules in the quintillions, a number requiring eighteen zeros, and each sailed into the nasal cavity like stones hurled at the night sky.
    — Blake Nelson, The Mercury News, 13 Oct. 2024
  • Jupiter, based at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, is one of the fastest in the world, capable of performing 1 quintillion calculations per second.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 15 Sep. 2025
  • There, interactions between streams of liquid iron generate a magnetic field one quintillion times more powerful than that of an ordinary lab magnet (but thousands of times weaker than the Sun’s).
    — Literary Hub, 27 Oct. 2025
  • With many millions of insect species (only about a million of which have been named) and 10 quintillion individuals, the world is literally crawling and buzzing with possibilities.
    — Greg Miller, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Dec. 2021
  • Both of these decay rapidly into even more particles, so in the end, ultrahigh-energy protons (with more than 50 quintillion eV) from distant galaxies should never reach us.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 3 Apr. 2026
  • But rather than a linear scale, which would take several quintillions of Earths lined end-to-end to reach the limits of the observable Universe, a logarithmic scale holds far more cosmic insights to an onlooker.
    — Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 1 Sep. 2025
  • While some argue that the costs will always be prohibitive, the riches on offer (Psyche, for example, has been estimated to be worth as much as $10 quintillion) are difficult to ignore.
    — Jason Thomson, The Christian Science Monitor, 13 Oct. 2023
  • Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop—more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 18 Dec. 2022
  • The facilities paused normal operations and delayed other research to allow the global telescope to come alive in search of radio waves from a ring of light encircling the shadow of a black hole more than 300 quintillion miles away.
    — Adam Glanzman, Smithsonian, 19 Nov. 2019
  • No Man’s Sky uses the Superformula and L-systems to create 18 quintillion planets with unique terrain, flora and fauna.
    — Amir Husain, Forbes.com, 29 Jan. 2026
  • According to the release, DNA testing showed the samples were 25 quintillion times more likely to have come from Hoff than the general population, police said.
    — NBC News, 20 Nov. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'quintillion.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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