Numbers in French from zéro to milliard: spelling and pronunciation

How numbers in French are built from 17 to 99

The first sixteen numbers in French are single words, from un to seize. From seventeen the system turns additive: dix-sept is ten-seven, dix-huit ten-eight, dix-neuf ten-nine. The tens from vingt to soixante then each take the units after a hyphen, vingt-deux, trente-cinq, cinquante-huit.

One sits apart. Twenty-one, thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-one and sixty-one join with et, and: vingt et un, trente et un, soixante et un. The same and comes back once more in soixante et onze, seventy-one, and then disappears: eighty-one is quatre-vingt-un and ninety-one quatre-vingt-onze, with hyphens only.

Seventy to ninety-nine are where French numbers become arithmetic. Seventy is soixante-dix, sixty-ten, and the count goes on soixante-onze, soixante-douze up to soixante-dix-neuf, seventy-nine as sixty-nineteen. Eighty is quatre-vingts, four twenties, and ninety is quatre-vingt-dix, four twenties and ten; ninety-seven is therefore quatre-vingt-dix-sept, four-twenty-ten-seven. The Académie française dictionary notes that quatre-vingts replaced the older octante and huitante in France.

Septante, huitante and nonante in Belgium and Switzerland

Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland kept the decimal words that France dropped. There seventy is septante and ninety is nonante, so 77 is septante-sept and 92 nonante-deux, numbers a visitor from Paris understands at once but would not say.

Eighty splits the two countries. Belgians say quatre-vingts like the French. In Switzerland the Wiktionnaire entry for huitante, drawing on the surveys of the Neuchâtel linguist Mathieu Avanzi, records huitante mainly in the cantons of Vaud, Valais and Fribourg, while the other French-speaking cantons mostly say quatre-vingts. The same entry finds huitante across the border in the Chablais of Haute-Savoie and in the Aosta Valley.

Quebec French counts like France: soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-dix. A learner who meets septante in a Brussels shop or huitante on a Lausanne bus can simply translate digit by digit, since both systems write the same figures.

Hyphens, the s of vingt and cent, and mille

Traditional spelling hyphenates numbers below a hundred, except around et: dix-sept, vingt et un, quatre-vingt-dix. Above a hundred it uses spaces, deux cent trente. The spelling rectifications approved by the Académie française and published in December 1990 simplified this: every part of a compound number may be linked by hyphens, vingt-et-un, deux-cent-trente, mille-six-cent-trente-cinq. Both spellings are correct, and since 2015 the official school curriculum in France names the 1990 rectifications as its reference.

Vingt and cent take an -s when they are multiplied and end the number: quatre-vingts, deux cents, trois cents euros. When another number follows, the -s goes: quatre-vingt-trois, deux cent un. The Académie dictionary illustrates it with il fête ses quatre-vingts ans beside quatre-vingt-un dollars and quatre-vingt mille euros, where mille counts as a following number.

Mille never changes: deux mille, dix mille. Million and milliard are nouns, so they take an -s and need de before what they count: trois millions d'habitants, deux milliards d'euros. Un is dropped before cent and mille, so one hundred is just cent and one thousand mille.

Ordinal numbers: premier, deuxième, troisième

French ordinals add -ième to the cardinal: deuxième, troisième, quatrième, dixième. A final e drops before the ending (quatre, quatrième), cinq inserts a u (cinquième) and neuf turns its f into v (neuvième). First is the exception, premier and feminine première, while second sits beside deuxième as a more formal word for second.

Abbreviations write the number with a superscript ending: 1er and 1re for premier and première, 2e, 3e and so on. Dates use only 1er, le 1er mai; from the second day on, French uses the plain number. Kings and centuries take Roman numerals, Louis XIV, le XXe siècle, read Louis quatorze and le vingtième siècle.

Decimal comma, spaces and how numbers are written in figures

French writes a decimal comma where English writes a point: 3,5 is trois virgule cinq. Thousands are grouped with a space, 1 000 000 for a million, and the Unicode CLDR locale data for French also puts a space before the percent sign, 25 %. Swiss French in the same data groups thousands with an apostrophe.

Prices follow the same pattern, 12,50 €, read douze euros cinquante; the CLDR currency format for French also places the euro sign after the amount with a space. A year is read as one whole number, 2026 as deux mille vingt-six, never split into two pairs the way English says twenty twenty-six.