this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21049862

The only numbers I will ever spell are one and zero, and only when using them as a pronoun, or for emphasis, respectively.

Is there ever a reason to not to use symbols when dealing with numbers? Why would "fourteen whatevers" ever be preferable to "14 whatevers". It's just so much easier to read numbers as symbols, not spelled out.

(Caveat, not including multipliers, like "273 billion").

(page 2) 34 comments
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

00, 01, 10 there i did it

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I spell out numbers when I want to emphasize them.

Take George Orwell for example:

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" has a lot more of a punch to it than just "1984."

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I used to work in a library, and I hate this. We used to have both a "2001: a space Odyssey" and a "two thousand and one: a space oddesey", sorted based on the spelling.

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

Isn't that part of the reason we have Dewey/LoC system?

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

Those are for academic books, not novels. And you'd still sort everything within a category alphabetically by author and then by title (usually)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I found Larry Flynt's autobiography at my university's library using the LCCN system.

Then again that's a University library so it might be different.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah haha, this is why it came to my mind. In this case it's a title, so not really for the purpose of being used as a number.

Though, I suppose I didn't specify this

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Spell out numbers under 10, but not when it's divisible by three or five.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Hahaha, of course, it makes so much sense now

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

I somehow have "spell out if less than 13" burned in my mind from somewhere in middle school. No idea if it is right, but so far it has worked.

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