Number to words
Type a number and read it written out. British and American English, whole numbers up to thirty-six digits, negatives and decimals.
Whole numbers up to 36 digits, negatives and decimals. Commas or spaces between thousands are fine, and so is a decimal comma where it cannot be one of them: 1 500,5.
one thousand five hundred
- Digits
- Other convention
- Ordinal
- Roman numeral
- Even or odd
How the spelling works
English builds every number out of about thirty words. Everything from one to nine hundred and ninety-nine is made from the first two tables below, and everything larger is one of those groups followed by a scale word.
Two rules do most of the work. Compound numbers between twenty-one and ninety-nine take a hyphen: twenty-one, forty-two, ninety-nine. And British English puts an and between the hundreds and what follows them, where American English does not.
The full set of rules, including when to use digits instead, is on the reference page.
One to twenty
- 1 one
- 2 two
- 3 three
- 4 four
- 5 five
- 6 six
- 7 seven
- 8 eight
- 9 nine
- 10 ten
- 11 eleven
- 12 twelve
- 13 thirteen
- 14 fourteen
- 15 fifteen
- 16 sixteen
- 17 seventeen
- 18 eighteen
- 19 nineteen
- 20 twenty
The tens
- 20 twenty
- 30 thirty
- 40 forty
- 50 fifty
- 60 sixty
- 70 seventy
- 80 eighty
- 90 ninety
The scale words
Each one is a thousand times the one above it. This is the short scale, which modern British, American, South African and Australian English all use, as does Indian English when it counts in millions rather than in lakh and crore. Older British books use the long scale, where a billion meant a million million.
| Word | Zeros | Written out |
|---|---|---|
| thousand | 3 | 1,000 |
| million | 6 | 1,000,000 |
| billion | 9 | 1,000,000,000 |
| trillion | 12 | 1,000,000,000,000 |
| quadrillion | 15 | 1,000,000,000,000,000 |
| quintillion | 18 | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
| sextillion | 21 | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
| septillion | 24 | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
| octillion | 27 | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
| nonillion | 30 | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
| decillion | 33 | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 |
Limits
- Numbers longer than thirty-six digits. English has no agreed name for the next group of three.
- Fractions written with a slash. The fraction tool takes those.
- Amounts of money. The money tool handles the currency units and the cents, which follow different rules.