British and American number formatting
One word separates the two conventions, and knowing which you are using matters more than which one you pick.
The difference in one line
British English puts and before the part of a number that follows the hundreds. American English does not. Everything else about spelling numbers out is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
| Number | British | American |
|---|---|---|
| 105 | one hundred and five | one hundred five |
| 110 | one hundred and ten | one hundred ten |
| 1001 | one thousand and one | one thousand one |
| 1010 | one thousand and ten | one thousand ten |
| 999 | nine hundred and ninety-nine | nine hundred ninety-nine |
| 1500 | one thousand five hundred | one thousand five hundred |
| 1000005 | one million and five | one million five |
| 2026 | two thousand and twenty-six | two thousand twenty-six |
Where the “and” actually goes
It appears in two places, and the second one is easy to miss.
- After a hundred, when something follows it. One hundred and five. Not after a bare hundred: one hundred, on its own, takes nothing.
- Before a final part below a hundred, when something larger came first. One million and five. This is why 1,000,005 is “one million and five” while 1,000,105 is “one million one hundred and five”: the second already has its “and” inside the last group, and a second one would be wrong.
Which convention goes where
- British form: the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand.
- American form: the United States, and Canadian usage in most places.
Neither is a mistake, and no reader anywhere will misunderstand the other one. What matters is consistency within a document, particularly a legal or financial one, where a number written two different ways on two different pages invites a question about which was meant.
What does not differ
- The hyphen in twenty-one through ninety-nine.
- The scale words (thousand, million, billion) and what each is worth.
- Reading decimals digit by digit after the point.
- Using a comma as the thousands separator and a full stop as the decimal point. That does differ elsewhere: much of Europe reverses the two, so 1.500,75 there is 1,500.75 here.
Which do the tools use?
British by default, because South African, British and Indian readers together outnumber American ones for this particular question. The switch at the top of every tool changes it, and the choice is remembered in your own browser.