The million is sometimes used in the English language as a metaphor for a very large number, as in "Never in a million years" and "You're one in a million", or a hyperbole, as in "I've walked a million miles". Il Milione is the title of Marco Polo's narration of his travel to China. The name is supposed to come from Polo's nickname after his tales of riches and multitudes.
The word "million" is common to the short scale and long scale numbering systems (and also to the proposed Rowlett numbering system), unlike the larger numbers, which have different names in the two systems.
The name is derived from Italian, where mille was 1,000, and 1,000,000 became milione, "a large thousand".
In standard English, the -lli- in million is pronounced with an l-sound followed by a y-glide. However, as other languages use a fully palatalized 'l' in this word (such as Italian spells by 'gl'), some English-speakers have picked up this pronunciation, which does not occur elsewhere in the English language but in words of this model.
This word is the most common of words ending in -lion. In American English this can cause spelling confusion due to its double 'll' while words like 'vermilion', 'pavilion', etc. are spelled with a single 'l'. This is not helped by the fact that it does not have a distinct pronunciation.
1,048,576 = 220 (power of two), 2,116-gonal number, an 8,740-gonal number and a 174,764-gonal number, the number of bytes in a mebibyte, the number of kibibytes in a gibibyte, and so on. Also the most rows that Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Office 2007) can accept in a single worksheet.