"Jigawatts! Doc, What the Hell is a Jigawatt?"

Marty McFly to Doc Brown in "Back to the Future"

I got an email recently asking if "jigawatt" was a real term, and what terms were used to describe large numbers of watts. Well, is "jigawatt" real? The answer is "yes" and "no"!

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At first I thought, like many fellow scientists, "Surely, Christopher Lloyd is just having fun with us! That's not how you pronounce gigawatt!"

Shortly thereafter, I got a nice laminated sheet from IUPAC with units and prefixes on it. They took special care to point out that giga- (the correct spelling!) was pronounced with the first g as a hard g, and the second, as a soft one! According to my Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993) the first (preferred) pronunciation is " 'ji - ge " (as in jiggle) and the alternative pronunciation is " 'gi - ge " (as in giggle).

OK, so you don't believe me!
But what about this pronouncing dictionary?

Just to add fuel to the fire, fish have gills (as in giggle), but I drink beer by the gill (as in jiggle or jill). A gill is 4 fluid ounces, 118.3 mL in the US and 142.1 mL in the UK.
(Thanks to Keith Oldham for pointing this out to me some years ago!)

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The following table was adapted from NIST Special Publication 811 which is available online at http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/contents.html or in PDF format from http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/sp811.pdf. My tax dollar at work!
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Factor	Prefix	Symbol

10³	kilo	k
10⁶	mega	M
10⁹	giga	G
10¹²	tera	T
10¹⁵	peta	P
10¹⁸	exa	E
10²¹	zetta	Z
10²⁴	yotta	Y

Also in common usage:
10¹	deka	da
10²	hecto	h

Factor	Prefix	Symbol

10^-3	milli	m
10^-6	micro	µ
10^-9	nano	n
10^-12	pico	p
10^-15	femto	f
10^-18	atto	a
10^-21	zepto	z
10^-24	yocto	y

Also in common usage:
10^-1	deci	d
10^-2	centi	c

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