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CALCPARK

Number to Words

Spell any number up to one quadrillion in English: cardinal, ordinal, currency words and cheque style, in American or British “and” form, with decimals and negatives.

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How to use it

  1. Type the number, with or without thousands separators. Use a dot as the decimal point.
  2. Choose American or British style – British inserts “and” after hundreds and before a final group under 100.
  3. Change the currency unit and subunit if you need an amount in words (euro/cent, pound/penny⁄pence, rupee/paisa…).
  4. Copy the cardinal words, the ordinal, the currency sentence or the cheque line; the link keeps your number and settings.

Example

1,234.56 → cardinal one thousand two hundred thirty-four point five six; currency one thousand two hundred thirty-four dollars and fifty-six cents; cheque One thousand two hundred thirty-four and 56/100. The whole number 1,234 is the ordinal one thousand two hundred thirty-fourth(1,234th). With British style the cardinal becomes “one thousand two hundred and thirty-four”, and 1,001 reads “one thousand and one”.

How the words are built

The number is split into groups of three digits from the right. Each non-zero group is spelled as hundreds + tens + units and followed by its scale word; groups that are zero are skipped, so 1,000,001 is “one million one” and not “one million zero thousand one”.

1,234,567 = [1] million [234] thousand [567]
          = one million two hundred thirty-four thousand five hundred sixty-seven

American and British style

American usage omits “and” inside a number (“one hundred one”, as in the Chicago Manual of Style); British usage puts “and” between the hundreds and the remainder of each group and before a final remainder below one hundred (“two thousand and five”). The “and” before cents in a currency amount is used in both varieties.

Ordinals

Only the last word changes: one → first, two → second, three → third, five → fifth, eight → eighth, nine → ninth, twelve → twelfth, -ty → -tieth, everything else adds -th (“one hundredth”, “one thousandth”). Digit suffixes follow the last two digits: 11th, 12th, 13th but 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 111th.

Currency and cheques

Amounts are rounded half up to two decimal places. The unit names are yours to set; regular plurals are formed automatically and irregular ones can be given as “penny/pence” or “yen/yen”. The cheque line follows the US and UK convention of writing the fraction as cents over 100 and starting with a capital letter; add the currency word after it if the cheque does not pre-print it.

Limits

  • Whole part up to one quadrillion (10¹⁵); fractions up to ten digits, read digit by digit.
  • Scientific notation (1e6), fractions (½) and year style (“nineteen ninety-nine”) are not produced.

Sources: Wikipedia – English numerals, Wikipedia – Long and short scales.

Is it billion or milliard?

English-speaking countries use the short scale, where each new word is a thousand times the previous one (million, billion, trillion). The long scale (billion = 10¹², milliard = 10⁹) survives in French, German and Spanish and in older British texts; the UK switched officially to the short scale in 1974.

Questions

How do I write 1,500 on a check?
Write “One thousand five hundred and 00/100” on the words line. Select the number in the tool and copy the “Cheque / check” output.
Should there be an “and” in one hundred and one?
In British English yes (“one hundred and one”); in American English the “and” is usually dropped (“one hundred one”). Both are available through the style switch.
How is 0.5 read?
As “zero point five”. Decimal digits are read one by one after “point”, so 0.25 is “zero point two five”, not “twenty-five hundredths”.
Why is the ordinal missing for my number?
Ordinals (first, second, …) exist for whole, non-negative numbers only. Remove the decimals or the minus sign to get one.