At One Place

Numbers in words

English numbers are built from about thirty words. Everything up to a billion is a combination of them, following three rules that hold without exception.

The three rules

  1. Numbers from 21 to 99 are hyphenated when they have two parts: forty-two, not forty two.
  2. British English inserts "and" before the last part of a number over 100 — "one hundred and five". American English omits it.
  3. Group names never take a plural when counting: "three hundred", not "three hundreds". They pluralise only when vague, as in "hundreds of people".

The building blocks

Forty has no "u" — fourteen and forty are spelled differently, which is the most common mistake.
Number Word Number Word
1 one 11 eleven
2 two 12 twelve
3 three 13 thirteen
4 four 20 twenty
5 five 30 thirty
6 six 40 forty
7 seven 50 fifty
8 eight 100 one hundred
9 nine 1,000 one thousand
10 ten 1,000,000 one million

Commonly looked up

Common questions

Is it "one hundred and five" or "one hundred five"?
Both are correct in their own dialect. British English uses "and" before the final part; American English leaves it out. Neither is a mistake.
When do you hyphenate numbers in words?
Between the tens and the units, from twenty-one to ninety-nine. Nothing else in an English number is hyphenated.
Why is it "forty" and not "fourty"?
Historical spelling drift. Four, fourteen and fourth all keep the "u"; forty lost it in the sixteenth century and never got it back. There is no rule behind it — it simply has to be remembered.

Sources

  1. Calculated on this page — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked