What is the biggest prefix in the metric system?

Answer 1

They avoid having to use huge numbers, or worse, extended decimals, to indicate quantities. How would you like to have an elephant weighed in at 5,500,000 grams or a human hair with a diameter of 0.000 1 meters?

There are more prefixes than get used, but this is OK; people can use the ones that best "fit" their subjects. For example, the metric for land is the are, which is 10 meters x 10 meters or 100 square meters. Nobody uses it; they prefer the unit closest to the acre, which is the hectare, or 100 are (10,000 square meters).

Choice of prefix can be idiosyncratic; what one person calls 100 millimeters, another could call 10 centimeters, or even 1 decimeter. Personally, I like to remember the sizes of countries in gigare, or billion are, a unit much more convenient (and therefore easier to recall) that 100,000 square kilometers, which is the way geography books give them. Smaller countries can be in megare (million are) and the whole of Planet Earth is 5.1 terare (trillion are).

Answer 2

The largest "metric measurement" doesn't make much sense. To see why, ask yourself which is larger, a meter or a watt? The two units can't really be compared, because they're measuring different and mostly unrelated things.

The largest SI prefix is "yotta-", which means 1024.

Answer 3

You can find a list of SI prefixes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefixes#List_of_SI_prefixes

Answer 4

it should be yotta with the symbol of Y.

See related link below for more info on Yotta

Answer 5

It depends what you want. some common ones are kilo (1000), centi (1/100) and milli (1/1000)

Answer 6

Yotta, at 10^24 or one septillion, is the largest standard prefix.