A million is far bigger than it sounds
A million seconds is about eleven and a half days. A billion seconds is nearly thirty-two years. The two words sit next to each other in a sentence and feel like neighbours, and they are nothing of the sort.
An American man called Jeremy Harper decided to COUNT out loud from ONE to a MILLION on camera in 2007. It took him eighty-nine days of sitting in a room saying numbers for sixteen hours at a stretch. Anybody who would like a sense of scale can try counting to a hundred and then multiplying the tedium by ten thousand.
Eleven, twelve, and why things come in twelves
English number words are mostly a tidy system. Thirteen through nineteen are all built the same way — three-and-ten, four-and-ten — and TWENTY and THIRTY are simply two tens and three tens wearing a disguise.
ELEVEN and TWELVE are not playing along. They come from old words meaning one-left-over and two-left-over, counted after the ten fingers have been used up. That is why a child who can chant confidently to TEN so often stalls immediately afterwards: there is no pattern to lean on, just two words that must be memorised before the system starts behaving again.
TWELVE divides neatly by TWO, THREE, FOUR and SIX. TEN only divides by two and FIVE. That one difference is why a DOZEN has outlasted every attempt to tidy it away, and why eggs, buns, hours on a clock face, months in a year and inches in a foot are all counted in twelves.
There may be a reason older than arithmetic. Hold up one hand, and use the thumb to tap the three little bones of each finger: four fingers, three bones each, twelve. Counting that way is still done across parts of Asia and the Middle East, and the second hand can keep track of how many twelves have gone by — which gets you to sixty, the base the Babylonians used and the reason an hour still has sixty minutes.
The world managed without zero for a long time
Roman numerals have no symbol for nothing, because nobody felt the need for one. You do not write down the sheep you do not have. The Indian mathematician Brahmagupta set out the rules for calculating with ZERO in the year 628, treating it as a proper NUMBER rather than a gap.
Everything since depends on it. A HUNDRED is written the way it is because the 1 needs two empty columns standing behind it to mean what it means, and without a symbol to hold those columns open the whole place-value system falls over.
Other languages count differently
French has no single word for ninety-nine; it says four-twenties-ten-nine, which is exactly as much fun for French children as it sounds. Danish is worse still. Welsh kept a traditional count built on twenties and then added a plain decimal version for schools, so pupils learn both.
English mostly escaped, though the old twenty-based counting is still lurking: a score means TWENTY, and Abraham Lincoln opened a speech with four score and seven years ago rather than eighty-seven.