Number to words (English)

What it's for

Handy for studying English, filling in checks in English, or learning to write numbers in words.

Note

Integers up to billions are handled. The form follows standard British/American English (e.g. one thousand two hundred thirty-four).

The three rules people get wrong most

The hyphen. From twenty-one to ninety-nine compound numbers are written joined by a hyphen: twenty-one, forty-five, ninety-nine. It's compulsory, and its absence is the most visible mistake in a written text.

The «and». British English puts it before the final tens: one hundred and twenty. American English skips it: one hundred twenty. Neither is wrong, but within one text you have to pick one.

The plural that isn't there. Hundred, thousand and million stay singular when preceded by a number: it's two hundred, never «two hundreds». The s appears only in vague use: hundreds of people, meaning an unspecified many.

The billion is the real trap

In English billion means a thousand million, not a long-scale billion. That's the short scale, used today across the English-speaking world and in finance; several European languages use the long scale, in which the same-looking word means a million million. Translating it the wrong way is out by a factor of a thousand, and it still ends up in newspapers.

From there the divergence grows: trillion in English is 10¹², which in the long scale is called a billion. When in doubt, in a serious document, the safe thing is to write the figures as well.

Years, phone numbers and prices have their own ways

A year is read in pairs of digits: 1985 is nineteen eighty-five, not «one thousand nine hundred eighty-five». From 2000 onwards you go back to the full form (two thousand and five) or use twenty twenty-five. A phone number is said digit by digit, and in Britain zero is often read oh. A price like 3.50 is said three fifty, and the dot is the decimal separator, not the thousands one.

Nearby tools

For Roman numerals there is Roman numerals. For imperial units there are Length converter and Weight converter.