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indefinite and fictitious numbers
Many languages have words expressing indefinite and fictitious numbers—inexact terms of indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as placeholder names, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. One technical term for such words is "non-numerical vague quantifier".〔("Bags of Talent, a Touch of Panic, and a Bit of Luck: The Case of Non-Numerical Vague Quantifiers" from Linguista Pragensia, Nov. 2, 2010 )〕
==General placeholder names==
English has many words whose definition includes an indefinite quantity, such as "lots", "many", "several", and "some". These placeholders can and often do have a generally equivalent numeral counterpart, e.g., "a couple" meaning two (2) or "a few" meaning approximately 3 to 6. Other placeholders can quantify items by describing how many fit into something that could change based on size, e.g., "a handful" represents more peanuts than apples. Larger quantities can be described by "half-dozen" (six units), "dozen(s)" (twelve units per dozen), and less commonly "tens", or "scores" (twenty units per score). Still larger quantities are described as hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, etc.
A number of other words and phrases are used to convey the idea in informal or humorous ways, such as slang terms like "metric shitload",〔metric shitload. Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions. Richard A. Spears. Fourth Edition. 2007. McGraw Hill.〕 "fuckton",〔Wiktionary:Citations:fuckton〕 "gobs of" (e.g. "gobs of jobs" career fair〔(NM Gobs of Jobs )〕), "''n''-something" used especially to indicate someone's age within a decade, e.g. "twentysomething" and similar terms used most often to indicate someone's age within a decade, and phrases like "to the ''nth''-degree".
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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