order of magnitude

order of magnitude

English

Noun

order of magnitude (plural orders of magnitude)

1. The class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio (most often 10) to the class preceding it. For example, something that is 2 orders of magnitude larger is 100 times larger, something that is 3 orders of magnitude larger is 1000 times larger, and something that is 6 orders of magnitude larger is a million times larger, because ${\\displaystyle 10^{2}}$ = 100, ${\\displaystyle 10^{3}}$ = 1000, and ${\\displaystyle 10^{6}}$ = a million.
   • 2011, Enrico Fermi, Wikisource (translator), Concerning a Contradiction between the Electrodynamic and Relativistic Theory of Electromagnetic Mass, 1922, Enrico Fermi, Über einen Widerspruch zwischen der elektrodynamischen und relativistischen Theorie der elektromagnetischen Masse, Physikalische Zeitschrift, v 23, pp 340-344,

     However, we notice that although this contraction is of order of magnitude ${\\displaystyle v^{2}:c^{2}}$, it changes the most important terms of electromagnetic mass, i.e, the rest mass.

   • 2019, Li Huang; James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI:10.1080/01434632.2019.1596115, page 8:

     However, this pales to insignificance against the massive volume of spoken language, for with over 500 patrons, any given second of the lunch hour would result in a spoken word count in the thousands, and the whole lunch hour would see a word count orders of magnitude larger than 3000.

Translations

class of scale

Arabic: please add this translation if you can Armenian: please add this translation if you can Chinese: Mandarin: 數量級／数量级 (zh) (shùliàngjí) Dutch: please add this translation if you can Esperanto: please add this translation if you can Estonian: please add this translation if you can Finnish: suuruusluokka (fi), kertaluokka (fi) French: ordre de grandeur (fr) m German: Größenordnung (de) f Hebrew: סֵדֶר גֹּדֶל‎ m (séder gódel) Hungarian: nagyságrend (hu) Irish: ord méadaíochta m Japanese: 桁 (ja) (keta) Korean: please add this translation if you can Norwegian: Bokmål: størrelsesorden (no) m Polish: rząd wielkości m Portuguese: ordem de grandeza f Swedish: storleksordning (sv) c Tamil: please add this translation if you can Thai: please add this translation if you can Turkish: please add this translation if you can Vietnamese: please add this translation if you can

See also

• dex
• ballpark figure (colloquial)