HOW TO SAY FIGURES AND NUMBERS

HOW TO SAY FIGURES AND NUMBERS[pic 1]

Cardinal Numbers

•  Learn the first twelve by heart:

One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine – Ten – Eleven – Twelve

•  Add ‘-teen’ for the next ones (13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19), and ‘-ty’ to form the tens (twenty, thirty…).

Ajoutez “teen” aux suivants et “ty” aux dizaines.

• Note that when you add a suffix to three, it changes into ‘thir-’ ; and five becomes ‘fif-’. (changement orthographique)

• Add a dash (-) between tens and units: 24, twenty-four. (dash => un trait d’union)

• Learn by heart the following numbers:

one hundred (100) – one thousand (1,000)

one million (1,000,000 / 1m.) – one billion (1,000,000,000 / 1b.)

Note that they usually don’t have a plural form: 6,000 people = six thousand people; except when talking about approximate numbers, and they are then followed by ‘of’: millions of pounds (£).

Les nombres dozen, hundred, thousand, million, billion

Dozen (douzaine), hundred, thousand, million, billion (milliard) sont invariables lorsqu’ils sont précédés d’un nombre ou de « a few, several ». Mais au sens de “des douzaines de…”, “des millions de…”, ils s’emploient comme tous les noms au pluriel.

Several million years / hundreds of years

Examples of numbers that are “not round” 

Note that you must use “and” between hundreds and tens (126: one hundred and twenty-six) but not between thousands and hundreds (6,100: six thousand one hundred) 

4,567: four thousand five hundred and sixty-seven

18,421: eighteen thousand four hundred and twenty-one

455,923: four hundred and fifty-five thousand nine hundred and twenty-three.

Decimal numbers

Les décimales se lisent chiffre par chiffre. On utilise un point en anglais, là où le français emploie une virgule.

The figures following the dot (“.”) are pronounced separately: 3.56 = three point five six (in French “trois virgule cinquante-six”).

How to say “0” in English

Ordinal numbers

• Just add ‘-th’: the sixth (6th), the seventh (7th), etc.

• The first three are irregular: the first (1st), the second (2nd), the third (3rd). 

Attention à la prononciation de « second » in English => /ˈsɛkənd/

• Note the spelling of the following: the fifth (5th), the ninth (9th), the twelfth (12th), the twentieth (20th), etc.

• They are used in fractions: 1/3 = one third, 2/5 = two fifths; except for ¼: one quarter, ¾: three quarters, ½: one half.

• They are used in dates: ‘on September the third’.

• They are used in the names of kings and queens: Elizabeth II = Elizabeth the second.

Dates

#1: a pair of two-digit numbers: 1550 (fifteen fifty) – 1945 (nineteen forty-five) – 1999 (nineteen ninety-nine) >> 1802 (eighteen oh two)

#2: 1800 (eighteen hundred) 1900 (nineteen hundred), 2000 (two thousand), etc.

#3: 2012 (two thousand and twelve or twenty-twelve), 2025 (two thousand and twenty-five or twenty twenty-five)

...