millionennium

English

Etymology

Blend of million +‎ millennium.

Noun

millionennium (plural millionennia or millionenniums)

1. (rare) Synonym of mega-annum: a period of time consisting of one million years.

   Coordinate terms: annum, biennium, triennium, quadrennium, quinquennium, sexennium, septennium, octennium, novennium, decennium, vicennium, tricennium, centennium, quincentennium, millennium, decamillennium, centimillennium

   • 1860, “Traditions and Superstitions”, in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume XXVII, Edinburgh: Sutherland & Knox; London: Partridge & Co., page 526, column 1:

     These superstitions and traditions were all odd and strange beliefs, which mingled the materialistic and the spiritual most incongruously; but they were not so degrading, and they were not so far from truth as the “enlightened” ideas respecting our origin, circulated in costly volumes during recent years, by authors whose Adam and Eve were frogs, formed from slime by the action of the sun, with a dash of electricity, and in which, from gratitude for their descent, their progeny for centuries, millenniums, or millionenniums wallowed.

   • 1890, “Passing Notes”, in Belford’s Magazine, volume VI, New York: Belford’s Magazine Company; Chicago: Belford-Clarke Company, page 109:

     What they should advocate, then, is, that the government should manufacture 65,000,000 greenbacks, each of one million dollars, and that one of these should be presented as a free gift to every one of our 65,000,000 people. Then every man, woman, and child in the country would be a millionaire, the currency would be sufficiently “expanded” to meet the demands of the most voracious, and wealth, contentment, and happiness would be universally diffused. In short, not merely the millennium, but the millionennium would have arrived. Just imagine it! a whole nation of millionaires!

   • a. 1914, Charles Sanders Peirce, quotee, “Elements of Logic”, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Harvard University Press, published 1932, pages 81–81:

     An emmet is far more competent to discourse upon the figure of the earth than we are to say what future millennia and millionennia may have in store for physical theories, with the atomic theory and the theory of light not yet one sleepy century old.

   • 1917, Emma Speed Sampson, “Chapter III: The Problem”, in The Carter Girls’ Weekend Camp, published 2017:

     Miss Helen is the same kind er spender as her maw. I believe my soul them two would ruther buy than eat. Cook used ter say that Mis’ Carter an’ Miss Helen spent like we done come to the millionennium.

   • 1951, George R. Stewart, Sheep Rock: A Novel, page 204:

     After that the land was quiet for a long time, and the decimillenia passed and ran on into centilmillenna, and the centimillennia piled up into millionennia.

   • 2000, James B. Reichmann, “Anthropocentrism, Biocentrism, Envirocentrism”, in Evolution, Animal ‘Rights’, and the Environment, Catholic University of America Press, →ISBN, pages 325–326:

     If what has occurred during the past “millionennia” through the process of natural selection is so worth treasuring and preserving, […]

   • 2002 July 24, Zeborah, “Re: How come Jean-Luc Picard is an atheist?”, in rec.arts.sf.composition (Usenet), message-ID <1ffuli5.1jnrg03twlaofN%zeborahnz@mac.com>:

     > > The reason that I ask is that I'm developing a Science Fiction story / > > which incorporates this idea. I'm wondering what kinds of religions / > > would arrise from this kind of information. Surely there would not be / > > a single galactic religion, / <snort> <choke> Um, understatement of the... millionennium.

   • 2003, Brian D. Joseph, Richard D. Janda, editors, The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Blackwell Publishing, →ISBN, page 56:

     Given that distortions of this sort (compression fractures, so to speak) are inevitable whenever the very closest comparanda across fossil records of any kind, linguistic or otherwise, are separated by millennia (in linguistic evolution) or even – to coin a useful term – millionennia (in biological evolution), how can we be so confident about our diachronic-linguistic activity in attempting to reconstruct details and overall structures of earlier language-states – as well as major changes in these – on the basis of arguably scanty textual evidence?

   • 2013, James H. McGavran III, transl., Selected Poems, Northwestern University Press, translation of original by Vladimir Mayakovsky, →ISBN, page 246:

      […] / to you, / who provided us / food, / drink, / and song / for a millionennium.