How big is a googol?

A googol is 1010010^{100}10100, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. It’s an enormous number—far bigger than anything you’d use in everyday counting.

Quick picture

• Written out, it starts as 1,0000... with 100 zeros.

• It’s sometimes described as roughly the size of 70!70!70! (70 factorial), though 1010010^{100}10100 is the exact googol.

• For scale, estimates put the observable universe at around 108010^{80}1080 particles, so a googol is vastly larger than that.

Simple example

If you tried to count to a googol at one number per second, it would take far longer than the current age of the universe. This is why people use “googol” mostly as a way to describe something unimaginably large, not as a practical quantity.