zillionaire : M-W's Word of the Day

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The Word of the Day for July 14 is:

zillionaire \zil-yuh-NAIR\ noun
: an immeasurably wealthy person

Example sentence:
The mansion on the hill is owned by a zillionaire investment banker.

Did you know?
The word "millionaire" has been used in English to designate a person who is worth a million pounds or dollars, depending on the side of the ocean, since 1826. We borrowed the word straight from the French, whose millions, of course, were in francs. When "millionaire" no longer sufficed, English speakers coined "billionaire" in 1860. The turn of the century apparently brought a turn of fortune, for soon afterwards "multimillionaire" and "multibillionaire" were created. By the 1940s we needed "zillionaire," so it's a good thing we had coined "zillion" -- for an indeterminately large number -- the previous decade. "Zillion" and "zillionaire" aren't used in the most formal of writing, but they have found their way into plenty of serious publications.

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