The BLC Blog

A forum and learning place for British Language Centre students

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Money: . & ,

One of those odd little differences that aren't really linguistic is that when writing numbers in English we use a full stop (AmEng period) where Spanish uses a comma, and we use a comma where Spanish uses a full stop.

For example, let's look at a very big amount of money:

€23,256,945.46

In English this is said:
"23 million,
two hundred and fifty-six thousand,
nine hundred and forty-five euros
and
forty-six cents".

Notice that essentially, saying large numbers in English is exactly the same in Spanish with one small exception: the "and" that we put betwen the hundreds and the tens. Most of the time you can hardly hear this "and", as it sounds more like 'n' when we speak normally.

Also note a few other things about writing numbers and amounts of money:
-- The euro/pound/dollar symbol goes BEFORE the number. $198, €53, £4,500.
-- When we write numbers from 21 to 99 (except for the tens, 30, 40, 50, etc.), they are hyphenated: twenty-one, thirty-five, seventy-six, ninety-nine.

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