sagan

name

1. A surname.
2. A village in Sardasht Rural District, in the Central District of Bashagard County, Hormozgan Province, Iran.
3. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative form of Sakan (village in West Azerbaijan, Iran).
4. A river in southern Ethiopia.

   “I had resolved to pass along the eastern shore of Lake Ganjule, in order to solve the problem of the sources of the river Sagan, the largest affluent of Lake Stefanie, which was supposed to flow out of Lake Ganjule. This I found to be not the case. The sources of the Sagan lie east of the south end of Lake Abaya. But there is a broad channel connecting Lake Ganjule with the Sagan.”

5. A town in southern Ethiopia, named for the river.

noun

1. (humorous, slang)A unit of measurement equal to at least four billion.

   “Today, there is a well-known joke unit of measurement called a Sagan. a Sagan is four billion—the smallest number that could fit the description "billions and billions."”

2. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of Sagan.

   “Part of it was that I just couldn't deal with a piece of primal matter floating around for sagans of years, eroding away until it became a nice, shiny, sharp-as-William-F.-Buckley's-tongue sword, with the old familiar "S" symbol coincidentally engraved on its hilt.”

   “"There must be a sagan of them up there."”

   “There are sagans of other planets crying out for this knowledge.”

   “The Jet and xBase database engines have been pounded on by who knows how many developers and end-users for years, which amounts to sagans and sagans of hours of real-world testing!”