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I am looking for a word which describes a number as having a magnitude greater than one. i.e. numbers such as 1.2, 100, 123456, -4, -1.01

Hopefully it should be usable in a sentence like this one:

There were a number of scenarios which had negative or greater than one coefficients.

Thanks in advance.

I hope this question is suitable for English exchange, otherwise I might try Math exchange.

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  • Maybe something similar to "extra-unary"?
    – Nonnal
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 5:44
  • I think you're going to have to stick with: "There were a number of scenarios which had coefficients with magnitudes greater than one"
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 6:20
  • Thanks for including the example sentence! I can't think of a word off the top of my head. It looks like you want an adjective, am I right?
    – herisson
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 6:56
  • @Jim Yeah I am thinking I might.
    – jnd
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 7:19
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    Why not just say "... coefficients outside the unit interval"? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_interval
    – anemone
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 8:59

4 Answers 4

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Have you considered symbolic syntax? For coefficients - a math concept - I'd think something like |β| > 1 (absolute value greater than 1) would be appropriate.

If symbolic isn't an option, I'd suggest "there were a number of scenarios with a non-directional coefficient greater than one". It's not open to ambiguity and works as an adjective to coefficient instead of introducing a new concept like "coefficient with a ..." does.

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  • If these solutions are readable by the OP's target audience, than it's hard to imagine a better answer.
    – indigochild
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 17:11
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It would be correct to say "...coefficients outside the closed interval [-1,1]." I'm pretty sure there's no specific adjective to modify "coefficients" that does what you want, but if I had to make one up it would be "superunital."

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You are searching for the term absolute value.

The phrase would be:

...an absolute value greater than or equal to one.

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  • 1
    I don't think that improves on the "magnitude greater than one" in the question. To be frank I think the best solution is simply to rearrange stuff in the question to get "...coefficients with magnitude greater than one". By the way note also that your "or equal to" is out of place here - the OP wants to exclude 1 and -1.
    – Rupe
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 9:36
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  • "coefficients that have an absolute value greater than one"
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  • that is easily misparsed as "coefficients that are negative" (eg., -0.4) or "coefficients greater than one".
    – Mark Brackett
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 20:42
  • @MarkBrackett: I don't understand. Can you explain the misparsing a bit more? What's the difference between the intended meaning and the mis-understood meaning?
    – herisson
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 22:25
  • the intended meaning is "coefficients that are less than -1" or "coefficients that are greater than 1".
    – Mark Brackett
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 23:35
  • My bad. Mowzer is correct about absolute value.
    – Brian Hitchcock
    Commented Nov 7, 2015 at 17:31

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