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The word millionaire has been used in English to designate a person who is worth a million pounds or dollars, depending on the side of the ocean, since 1786. We borrowed the word straight from the French, whose millions, of course, were in francs. Millionaire eventually no longer sufficed, and English speakers coined billionaire in 1844. Soon afterwards came multimillionaire, followed by multibillionaire in the early 1900s. Once zillion was made up as a humorous word for an indeterminately large number (patterned on million and billion), it was only a matter of time before zillionaire came along as a humorous word for a person of seemingly immeasurable wealth. Zillion and zillionaire aren't used in the most formal of writing, but they have found their way into plenty of serious publications.
Examples of zillionaire in a Sentence
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune, 6 July 2023
Can a tech zillionaire be funny?
—Jason Gay, WSJ, 9 May 2021
Disaster strikes when Loretta is kidnaped by eccentric zillionaire Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe) who hopes to use her anthropological knowhow to recover an ancient whatsit from a remote jungle island.
—Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 24 Mar. 2022
The mission here is to save the world from its hideous near-future and to prevent time travel from being invented and exploited, for personal gain, by the all-powerful tech zillionaire played by Catherine Keener.
—Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 10 Mar. 2022
Among the tech zillionaire classes, a place to bug out in the event of an economic collapse, environmental disaster or violent uprising became the thing to have.
—Alex Williams, New York Times, 18 Oct. 2019
So, Jenny and Ken are boneheads and still think Fox is Jamie Foxx, because clearly in their world an Oscar-winning zillionaire needs to grovel for minor coins on this trash.
—Robbie Daw, Billboard, 19 Dec. 2019
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Payton’s mom with a benevolent glow; the family also includes a gerbil-like zillionaire father (Bob Balaban) and Payton’s two older brothers, a set of toxic jocks with popped collars.
—Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, 24 Sep. 2019
The boy zillionaire saves his parents and Rich Industries from a scheming executive.
—Los Angeles Times, 11 Aug. 2019
Dictionary Entries Near zillionaire
Cite this Entry
“Zillionaire.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zillionaire. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
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