Will 'hella' follow mega, giga and tera?

A physics student lobbies to make a California slang term become the next unit of metric measurement

One day in the distant future, when our descendents complain about their sluggish "yottabit" Internet connections, they may -- thanks to the efforts of a University of California Davis student -- state their desired network performance in hellabits.

Physics student Austin Sendek has started a campaign to make "hella-" the next official prefix for metric measurements, and his effort has begun to gather momentum, at least in terms of popularity.

By his own reckoning, he has until September to convince as many people as possible to start using this bit of northern California slang to refer to the measurements of all things in the 10^27 scale.

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One day in the distant future, when our descendents complain about their sluggish "yottabit" Internet connections, they may -- thanks to the efforts of a University of California Davis student -- state their desired network performance in hellabits.

Physics student Austin Sendek has started a campaign to make "hella-" the next official prefix for metric measurements, and his effort has begun to gather momentum, at least in terms of popularity.

By his own reckoning, he has until September to convince as many people as possible to start using this bit of northern California slang to refer to the measurements of all things in the 10^27 scale.

"There is no question as to what you mean. If you say something weighs hellagrams, you'd think 'Well that's a lot of grams,'" he said.

Thus far the Facebook page he has started to get the word out has attracted almost 60,000 votes of approval, or "Likes" in Facebook speak, for the idea.

The International System of Units, otherwise known as the metric system, has a set of prefixes to designate the mathematical scale of the unit being measured. This is where we get the mega, giga, tera and peta prefixes.

At present, SI's largest official unit of measurement is the yotta, which is 10^24, or a quadrillion. Because units of measurement jump by powers of three, the next as-of-yet unnamed prefix would be 10^27, or 1 octillion, which is a 1 followed by 27 zeros.

The idea started as a lark. Sendek first thought of the idea while in a physics class, when he asked his labmate how many volts were in an electric field they were studying, and his labmate answered, offhandedly, "hellavolts."

"I chuckled to myself and thought it would be funny if hellavolt were a real thing," he said. He knew that existing prefixes ended in the letter "a," such as mega and giga, so the term fit.

According to one definition in the Urban Dictionary, the term Hella "is commonly used in place of 'really' or 'very' when describing something." It is a contraction of the word "helluva," itself a contraction.

Legend has it that the term originated from the San Francisco area. In any case, it has long been a widely used term in those parts, dating back perhaps as far as the late 1970s.

Sendek said he started a Facebook page on the idea mainly as a joke, but received such an overwhelming response, especially from those in the scientific community, he started to campaign in earnest. He soon set up a blog and an online store to further propagate the idea.

Certainly, we seem to be hurdling into an era of such large scales.

Earlier this week, IT research firm IDC, in a study backed by EMC, predicted that the amount of digital information stored this year will be 1.2 zettabytes, and by 2020 it will be 35 zettabytes.

A zettabyte (10^21) is one level below that of the yotta.

Some things could already be best measured at the hellalevel. Sendek calculated that, for instance, the sun has a mass of 2.2 hellatons, and would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts (300 yottawatts for the more traditionally minded).

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.