Orders of magnitude (power)

Orders of magnitude (also known as powers) are a way to think about how big or small a number is. It's like counting in tens: one, ten, hundred, thousand! When you get to a thousand, you can say you've increased by one order of magnitude. To increase by another order of magnitude, you can count up in tens again: ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million, ten million and so on. So when talking about orders of magnitude, each number is usually 10 times bigger than the number before it.