Kirk Mahoney . com

I saw this in an Ars Technica article published today about the Nintendo DSi.

I like the creativity of “eleventy billion”.

I searched for “eleventy” (with the quotation marks) on Google, and I got about 304,000 matches.

According to Wikipedia, the word “eleventy” was coined by linguist and author J. R. R. Tolkien and refers to the number 110.

I can imagine that some non-native speakers of English must be puzzled when they see this word, but it also makes sense when one compares it to the rhyming word “seventy”.