Million

How to spell million

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce million

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does million mean?

1. nounThe cardinal number equal to one thousand thousand (1,000,000).

Million in a sentence

• The lottery jackpot reached one million pounds this week.

• The city has a population of nearly three million people.

Where does million come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin mille, meaning simply 'thousand', the same root that gives us 'mile' (originally a thousand paces) and 'millennium'. Italian merchants took mille and added the augmentative ending -one to form milione, which literally meant something like 'a great thousand', a vivid way of naming a number that dwarfed ordinary counting. English borrowed the word through Old French milion during the late 1300s, at a time when large-scale trade and finance were making such big numbers genuinely useful. The doubled L preserves the Latin mille, while the single N reflects the French and Italian forms, and that combination (double L, single N) is exactly the spelling people need to fix in memory. Its relatives 'billion' and 'trillion' were later coined on the same pattern to extend the series.

How the word is built

• mille (Latin for 'thousand')
• -ion (augmentative ending borrowed via Italian milione: a 'great thousand')