In a word – google

Google has got to be easily the best-known new word of our time. It is also said to be a mistake. At least some people insist this is the case.

It has been defined as "to search the Web using the search engine Google for information on a person or thing" and was nominated in 2002 as Word of the Year (why not?) by the American Dialect Society.

However, it lost out to WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). Remember this was the year before the US and UK invaded Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and which led to the emergence of IS today. Such was the outcome of the Bush/Blair Project.

But, to google. We are told it derived its name from the word "googol", said to have been coined in 1920 by a nine-year-old boy. Milton Sirotta, nephew of the US mathematician Edward Kasner, was asked by his uncle to invent a name for a very large number, 10 to the power of 100 (which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). The boy called it "a googol".

So the word was used by Edward Kasner in his book Mathematics and the Imagination, co-authored with James Newman. Another mathematician brought it a step further when he invented the word "googolplex" to represent 10 to the power of a googol. I have no idea how many zeros that would result in, but it's a lot.

Google, the company, was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were doctoral students at Stanford University in the US, and it is said the adopted the word as a name for their search-engine. Some say they intended to call it "googol", because of the endless amount of data found on the information superhighway it allows access to, and that this became accidentally transposed to google. Will we ever know whether this was so?

Regardless, Google Inc opened at Menlo Park, California, in a sublet garage on September 7th, 1998. By 1999 it was named in Time magazine's Top Ten Best Cybertech list.

By the end of 2014 it employed 53,600 worldwide, had assets valued at US$131.133 billion, and a net income of US$14.444 billion. For which there is only one adjective – googolactic.

Okay. It’s made up. But why not? inaword@irishtimes.com