Numbers in Turkish from sıfır to milyar: ordinals and pronunciation

How numbers in Turkish are built

Numbers in Turkish follow one plain rule: there is a word for each ten, and the units simply follow it. On is ten, so on bir is eleven, on iki twelve, on dokuz nineteen; yirmi is twenty, so yirmi beş is twenty-five. There is no teen form, no and, and no hyphen. The tens are yirmi, otuz, kırk, elli, altmış, yetmiş, seksen and doksan; they share nothing with the units they multiply, so they have to be learned as words, and kırk and altmış carry the dotless ı.

Hundreds and thousands work the same way, with a multiplier before the unit: iki yüz, two hundred; beş bin, five thousand; on bin, ten thousand. A year reads from left to right in one run: 2026 is iki bin yirmi altı.

Each component is a separate word in the spell-out rules that Unicode CLDR publishes for Turkish, the rules software uses to write a figure out in letters. Long figures on cheques and contracts are therefore a string of short words, bin dokuz yüz yirmi beş for 1,925, rather like reading the digits aloud in groups.

No bir before yüz and bin, but bir milyon

One hundred is yüz and one thousand is bin, never bir yüz or bir bin. The CLDR rules state it directly: 100 is yüz, 200 is iki yüz, 1,000 is bin, 2,000 is iki bin. Above that the rule changes. A million is bir milyon and a billion bir milyar, with the one spoken, because milyon and milyar behave like nouns borrowed from French.

Bir has a second job. Wiktionary lists it as the indefinite article as well, a or an, so bir kitap can mean one book or a book. Colloquial speech shortens the article to bi, written bi' in informal text, while the numeral keeps its full sound.

Turkish milyar is 10⁹, the English billion, and trilyon is 10¹²; there is no long-scale confusion of the kind that surrounds billion in some European languages.

Singular nouns after numbers, and kaç

A noun after a number stays in the singular. Turkish usually marks plurality once: the number already says how many, so the plural suffix -ler or -lar is left off, as in beş baş, five head, the example of Wikipedia's Turkish grammar article. Wiktionary's example under yüz is iki yüz lira, two hundred lira; English would add an s, Turkish does not. Üç kitap is three books and beş kişi five people.

The question word is kaç, how many: kaç kişi? asks how many people, and kaç yaşındasın? how old are you, literally how many years are you in. The answer copies the pattern with a number: yirmi beş yaşındayım.

Suffixes on a number follow vowel harmony like any other word. Dört becomes dörd- before a vowel, so to four is dörde. In figures the suffix is joined with an apostrophe, the style that also appears in CLDR's fallback for ordinals: 5'e, 10'da.

Each, and a half: distributives and buçuk

A distributive suffix turns a number into so many each. Birer is one each, from bir plus -er, and Wiktionary lists sekizer, eight each, under sekiz. Çocuklara birer elma verdim says I gave the children an apple each.

Half after a number is buçuk: iki buçuk, two and a half. Wiktionary's example is günlük iki buçuk litre su içmelisiniz, you should drink two and a half litres of water a day. Clock times use it too, so saat üç buçuk is half past three.

Writing numbers in Turkish: comma, dot and percent

Turkish writes figures the continental way. The CLDR locale data sets the decimal separator to a comma and the group separator to a full stop, so 1,925.5 in English becomes 1.925,5 in Turkish. A price of 12,50 TL is twelve lira fifty.

The percent sign stands before the number. CLDR's percent pattern for Turkish is %#,##0, which prints %50, read yüzde elli, literally fifty in a hundred. English speakers often write 50% out of habit; Turkish typesetting puts the sign first.

The digits themselves are the ordinary Western ones. Ottoman Turkish used Arabic-script numerals, and the digits in many languages set the Turkish counting words beside the Ottoman ones, bir beside بر and on beside اون.