Numbers and Words

[snooper]

When do my literate friends think that words should be used instead of numbers, in fictional work?

I believe that There were two of them. is better (in some way I can't define) than There were 2 of them.; and clearly There were 54 of them. is better than There were fifty-four of them..

Where do you draw the line, or perhaps you disagree completely?

 

[*Catbabe*]

Hi Snooper,
Any number under a hundred should be written out fully when used in a sentence.
Cat

 

[snooper]

Hi Snooper,
Any number under a hundred should be written out fully when used in a sentence.
Cat

So you think I should write Is this the bus stop for the ninety-one? and would allow There were a 1000 of them.?

 

[*Catbabe*]

In my opinion, your example is correct.

 

[hiddenself]

According to the CMS, the numbers one through one hundred should be spelled out, while larger numbers should be written out as numerals.

But the numbers one through ninety-nine followed by “hundred,” “thousand,” “hundred thousand,” “million,” and so on should also be spelled out (e.g., two hundred three thousand men, rather than 203,000).

On the other hand, numerals should always be used with "percent" (e.g., 1 percent, 54 percent).

Finally, always spell out numbers if they begin a sentence.

I'm sure there are other exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions...

 

[Madame Manga]

I disagree with the CMS about always using numerals with percentages. (And on a number of other questions.) Usually the smaller the number, the more likely I am to want to see it spelled out, no matter the context.

Example A: "I'm 99 percent sure that I will never vote for George Bush,"

or

"I am ninety-nine percent sure that I will have more than two cups of coffee today."

Example B: "Only 1 percent of the students will receive passing grades,"

or

"The sales tax is one percent of the purchase price."

In both cases, the numerals strike me as less formal and less correct than spelling out the number. In the first case, "99 percent" is a large enough number to be acceptable in casual writing, IMO, but "1 percent" will never pass muster to my conservative eye.

Newspaper editors let howlers slip by every day. My old English teacher used to tell her students to read the paper to learn good usage. That hasn't been possible for fifteen years at least.

My personal preference is to write out as many numbers as possible. Obviously there are impossible ones: 131, 569 is far better than "One hundred and thirty-one thousand, five hundred sixty-nine."

MM

 

[Rainbow Skin]

Write out all numbers that occur naturally as numbers: there were fifty-four of them, two hundred people were interviewed, ten million bisexuals can't be wrong. By flipping a coin you're right fifty percent of the time. The news says two hundred and seventy-eight people died on the ferry.

But the number 43 bus, the $64 000 question, the 99.44% solution. In these the notation is part of the name.

In printed books, the above are probably how you would see them.

Use numerals when it's more like a list or statistic: the poll showed 42% for Labour and 36% for the Conservatives. The new Bundestag will have 176 FDP members, 121 SDP, and 10 Greens. The population of Upper Slobbovia was 131 569 at the last census.

 

[Madame Manga]

You are making sense, Rainbow Skin.

On a side note, I see you are using European notation for numbers above a thousand: 131 569 instead of 131, 569. American notation puts a comma in the space, European does not. Not a typo either way, of course, but not everyone is aware of that little detail.

MM

 

[Weird Harold]

Example A: "I'm 99 percent sure that I will never vote for George Bush,"

or

"I am ninety-nine percent sure that I will have more than two cups of coffee today."

If you spell out the word "percent," then you should also spell out the number associatied with it.

In your first eaxmple, it should be "I'm 99% sure..." OR "I'm ninety-nine percent sure..." But NEVER "I'm 99 percent sure..."


As my rule of thumb, which is NOT in any way an official rule, I spell out any number under one thousand unless there is a specific reason to use the numerals -- such as statistics, percentages and numbers that are harder to read as words than as numerals.

 

[Madame Manga]

http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/numbers.htm

Here's a good and particularly exhaustive link on the subject!

 

[Chicklet]

Snoop I just want to thank you for asking this question because it's something I'm always wondering about. I thought that you were s'posed to write out anything under ten, but do numbers for anything over. Glad to have it cleared up.

Chicklet

 

[Rainbow Skin]

That link Madame Manga posted says it's 'meant primarily for standard academic prose'. I think this is likely to contain more numbers than fiction, and fiction should be more conservative in its use of numerals: two inches, five-minute delay, twenty-three years old, thirty-two players.

But 65 mph, because numeral and symbol go together, and this is something you'd see on a sign. Perhaps I'd even elevate that to a guideline: the car can go a hundred kilometres an hour; the speed limit is 100 km/h.

Approximate numbers should be in words: a thousand students can be 997 or 1004 students.

When one number follows another it's usually because the second is a measurement, and I'd turn that into its digital-symbolic form: ten 4-ft boards, six 50-W bulbs. Actually, the hyphenation for adjectival use is the style used in Nature, but I'd prefer six 50 W bulbs, unmodified.

 

[snooper]

Glad to have it cleared up.

I'm glad you think it is cleared up. I only learned what the US academics think, and I differ from the CMS in so many places that you wouldn't believe it. I find that I'm actually close to being with WH on this (as usual) when I looked back through my novels to see what I actually did.

 

[ag2507]

Snoop I just want to thank you for asking this question because it's something I'm always wondering about. I thought that you were s'posed to write out anything under ten, but do numbers for anything over. Glad to have it cleared up.

Chicklet

I think under ten is the more widely accepted practice: the under 100 idea is, I think, someone trying to change that practice. Words like fourtythree on the page ar very clumsy looking.

AG

 

[Rainbow Skin]

It's almost impossible to find numerals in fiction. Such as there are are dates, and very specific numbers over a hundred.

From an Iris Murdoch (Penguin): two minutes, four days, two aspirins, Emily was twenty-two, after five o'clock, by the time he's twelve. -- But unquestionably twenty-two: I can't imagine seeing 'Emily was 22.' in a real printed book.

Better pickings from an E. L. Doctorow (Picador): seventeen thousand dollars, the 1870s, Ninety-third Street, 1871, a two-horse team, seven days, two dollars, eight-hour workday, Forty-second Street, walls were twenty-five feet thick and rose forty-four feet, in his late thirties, 117th Street, some twelve million dollars, twenty miles north of the city.

Ursula Le Guin (Flamingo): every thirty stitches, fifty years ago, eleven years, 103 or 104 degrees in Chico, she weighed at most ninety pounds, two hundred miles up I-5, till after four, nine P.M., his hundred-and-forty-dollar running shoes, a fifteen-year-old's, 1937, sixty years, quarter-inch-thick sheet of clay, a thousand things yet to be done.

Bernard Levin (essays, Sceptre): £2, a few billion pounds, 50p, eighty-nine when he died, allow twenty-eight days for receipt, £14.95, Boeing 757, the mid-1950s, hundreds of millions of people, at least 1,300,000 kangaroos, totalled some 17 million, seventy-six people, [population] was more than 2,000,000. -- These were originally printed in The Times, thus the journalistic use of numerals where an original book would probably have two pounds, fifty pence, two million, and seventeen million.

 

[bigblueboy]

Bus stop number

As for the question about the bus stop sentence, I've always seen subway and bus numbers used as digits and not spelled out. For instance, "Johnny knew the 6 train didn't go to 101st Street."

As the sentence states, you don't spell out a street number unless it appears that way. I live in area where there is a 5th Street, but Forty-Third Street is never spelled out. I don't know why, either.

Hope this confus-- er, helps you.

 

[snooper]

Re: Bus stop number

As for the question about the bus stop sentence, I've always seen subway and bus numbers used as digits and not spelled out. For instance, "Johnny knew the 6 train didn't go to 101st Street."

Thinking about this, I wonder if we use figures where we see figures and words where we see words or objects? On a bus there is a big figure 6 on the front so we write "the number 6 bus". If there are six boys in a group we write "six boys". Similarly with sports scores, which appear on scoreboards in numbers.

As the sentence states, you don't spell out a street number unless it appears that way. I live in area where there is a 5th Street, but Forty-Third Street is never spelled out.

Fortunately in the Old World we have not yet run out of low grade politicians who want streets named after them, so we have not descended to numbering them.

Hope this confus-- er, helps you.

Yes, actually (see first quote above). Thank you.