Numbers in Dutch from nul to miljard: spelling rules and ordinals

How the numbers in Dutch are built

Elf and twaalf, eleven and twelve, stand outside the pattern just as their English cousins do, and they are the last numbers a learner has to memorise as single words. Thirteen to nineteen add -tien, ten, to the unit, with small changes in the stem: dertien for thirteen, veertien for fourteen. The tens add -tig: twintig, dertig, veertig, vijftig, zestig, zeventig, negentig. Eighty is the irregular one, tachtig, with a t at the front that the other tens lack.

Between the tens Dutch puts the unit first. Eenentwintig is one-and-twenty, vierendertig four-and-thirty, negenennegentig nine-and-ninety. English speakers who know German will recognise the order, and English itself had it in four-and-twenty blackbirds. The habit takes practice when listening: in a telephone number or a price, the second digit is heard before the first.

Read aloud, numbers in Dutch therefore reverse the order of the digits for every two-digit pair. Hundreds are simply multiplied, tweehonderd, driehonderd, and the rest is attached without a break: 338 is driehonderdachtendertig, 915 negenhonderdvijftien. Honderd and duizend need no een in front of them, so 100 is honderd and 1,000 duizend.

One word up to duizend, and the trema in tweeëntwintig

The spelling rules for numbers written in words are short. Team Taaladvies, the language advice service of the Flemish government, states them as follows: write the number as one word up to the word duizend, put a space after duizend, and put a space before and after miljoen, miljard, biljoen and the larger names. So 2026 is tweeduizend zesentwintig, and 1,001 is duizend een or duizend en een.

Twee and drie end in e, and the linking en would then produce an ambiguous ee. Dutch solves it with a trema on the second e: tweeëntwintig, drieëndertig, tweeënvijftig. The same rule gives drieënhalf, three and a half.

Een has a second written form, één, with acute accents on both letters. Onze Taal's advice is to use it only when the word means the number one and is stressed in the sentence, to separate it from the indefinite article: één kopje, one cup, against een kopje, a cup. In counting and in compounds such as eenentwintig the accents are not written.

Miljoen, miljard, biljoen: the long scale

Dutch counts large numbers on the long scale. A miljoen is a million and a miljard a thousand million. Onze Taal's explanation of biljoen spells out the trap for English readers: a biljoen is a million times a million, 10¹², which English calls a trillion, and a triljoen is 10¹⁸. The English billion is the Dutch miljard.

A Dutch report of drie miljard euro therefore means three billion euros in English, and a translation that turns biljoen into billion is off by a factor of a thousand.

Large numbers in Dutch are written in figures with a full stop or a space between groups of three, as in Onze Taal's 1.000.000.000.000 for a biljoen; the comma is the decimal sign, so 2,5 is twee komma vijf. Ordinals of large numbers take -ste: honderdste, duizendste, miljoenste. In figures an ordinal is written 1e or 1ste, 8e or 8ste, 13e or 13de: the Flemish spelling rules allow both the short e and the full ending.

Numbers in Belgium and the Netherlands

The numbers themselves are the same on both sides of the border. Belgian French has septante and nonante for seventy and ninety, but Belgian Dutch has nothing similar: zeventig and negentig are used in Flanders as in the Netherlands, and Wiktionary records the same pronunciation for twee in both countries.

In bilingual Brussels the two systems meet: French counts ninety-four as nonante-quatre, ninety and four, while Dutch says vierennegentig, four-and-ninety.