Fella, that is one helluva big prefix, hella

As a high school student, way back in the day (early 1980s), “mega” was our favorite term for expressing wonder, it was equivalent to “awesome”. Of course, it has its roots in the Greek language as a word for “large” but is used scientifically as a prefix alongside milli, micro, kilo etc to represent a millionfold; viz a megatonne is a million tonnes, a megabyte is a million bytes (approximately, ask your computer science friends to explain why it ain’t necessarily so).

Anyway, this period of using mega as a synonym for awesome was long before the days when even a few kilobytes were enough memory for anyone. We were all nerdy science majors into Rush and Zeppelin (some of us still are) and a decade or so before BBC kids TV latched on to the term and started rebranding its shows to fit.

This geeky predilection for prefixes seems to have come back into fashion decades later, and it was with amusement, that I read that a student in California was hoping to create his own scientific prefix – “hella”. Apparently, hella is Northern Californian slang for “really” or “a lot of.” Physics student Austin Sendek, of UC Davis has started a petition to establish hella as a new prefix alongside mega, kilo, yotta and yocto, for units of weight, distance, computer storage, etc.

Sendek proposes that under the International System of Units (SI), hella would follow zetta (10^21), and yotta (10^24) and be used to indicate quantities of 10^27 (a 1 followed by 27 zeros). It’s possible that there may be competition from the prefix “bronto”, but that prefix has a somewhat checkered history.

Just to give you an idea of how big the hella prefix is…the sun produces a mere 0.3 hellawatts of power and the known universe is just 1.4 hellameters across!

According to the Sacramento Bee, Sendek’s petition on Facebook already has hella signatures (20000+ at the time of writing). Hat tip to Daniel C for alerting me to this campaign.