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771

How to say the number 92 (i.imgur.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (4 children)

You probably did, but then you did the sensible thing and (mostly) changed it around. You can read some 19th century novels and find stuff like "I am two and twenty years old".

Mostly because it's still the old order for the teens. 1616 could be read as sixteen hundred sixteen, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hmm is that actual English usage or an author thinking in German and translating badly (there were lots of German immigrants to North America).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't think e.g. Jane Austen was German.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Or Shakespeare...

Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't think I've seen people read 1616 as sixteen hundred sixteen. You could read 1600 as sixteen hundred, but when there are numbers in the tens and ones spots I don't see anyone using it. The whole thing using sixteen-hundred is weird to me, it's one thousand six hundred sixteen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I've heard it lots of times (sometimes just as "sixteen sixteen") - mostly for years though.

And it seems like Wikipedia agrees:

In American usage, four-digit numbers are often named using multiples of "hundred" and combined with tens and ones: "eleven hundred three", "twelve hundred twenty-five", "forty-seven hundred forty-two", or "ninety-nine hundred ninety-nine".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_numerals)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

you're correct, but it may seem antiquated to some.. the full "old" way to say it was 16 hundreds and 16..

when i read 1,500, it's about 50/50 that it's one thousand five hundred, or fifteen hundred

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And that's because the numbers we use today where originally brought to Europe by Arabs. Arabic is read right to left. So having reading numbers that way used to be the 'correct' way in lots of languages. German is just one of the few ones that stuck with it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

People only borrowed the symbols for numbers from Arabic, not the actual concept of numbers themselves.