Unofficial Prefixes
There are many unofficial or fabricated metric prefixes circulating the internet, especially for values smaller than 10−24 or larger than 1024. One unofficial prefix is bronto-, which has been used in the term brontobyte to represent anything from 1015 to 1027 bytes. SI has already produced standard prefixes for 1015 (peta), 1021 (zetta) and 1024 (yotta).
In 2010, an online petition sought to establish hella as the SI prefix for 1027, a movement that began on the campus of UC Davis. The prefix, which has since appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Wired and some other scientific magazines, was recognized by Google, in a non-serious fashion, in May 2010. Ian Mills, president of the Consultative Committee on Units, considers the chances of official adoption to be remote.
A more serious proposal from 2003 by Jim Blower follows the already existing naming convention based on reverse lettering in the alphabet:
- zetta-, yotta-, xona-, weka-, vunda-, uda-, treda-, sorta-, rinta-, quexa-, pepta-, ocha-, nena-, minga-, luma-, ...
- zepto-, yocto-, xonto-, wekto-, vunkto-, unto-, trekto-, sotro-, rimto-, quekto-, pekro-, otro-, nekto-, mikto-, lunto-, ...
The z and y on the extreme prefixes zepto-, yocto- and zetta-, yotta- suggest the start of a series backwards through the alphabet. Following the initial letters are distorted Greek numerals (h)epta- and octa-. This pattern has been extended further, with the terms xenno-, weko-, vendeko- and xenna-, weka-, vendeka- from Greek ennea-, deka-, endeka-; sometimes a t is added for greater differentiation, though both xento-, wekto- etc. and xenta-, wekta- etc. have been proposed.
Read more about this topic: Unit Prefix