The word _chuffa_ signifies 1, hence these expressions are seen at a glance to be coined solely for the purpose of gratifying a little harmless Choctaw vanity.

But this is innocence itself compared with the fraud perpetrated on Labillardiere by the Tonga Islanders, who supplied the astonished and delighted investigator with a numeral vocabulary up to quadrillions.

Their real limit was afterward found to be 100,000, and above that point they had palmed off as numerals a tolerably complete list of the obscene words of their language, together with a few nonsense terms.

These were all accepted and printed in good faith, and the humiliating truth was not discovered until years afterward.[137] One noteworthy and interesting fact relating to numeral nomenclature is the variation in form which words of this class undergo when applied to different classes of objects.

To one accustomed as we are to absolute and unvarying forms for numerals, this seems at first a novel and almost unaccountable linguistic freak.