how to say 87
most Americans: 80+7
Abraham Lincoln: 4Γ20+7
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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I've realized from this thread that I have a weird way of reading multiplication that feels very antiquated. I have nothing to add to your comment or the conversation, I just felt like it fits a bit here, where you referenced the antiquated "score" counting.
In my head, I don't read that as "four times twenty plus ten" it's "four by twenty plus ten"
I have no idea where that came from, and I need to ask family members if they do it too
I mean multiplication comes from the the area of a rectangle. A rectangle that is 4 by 4 has an area of 16, in other words 4 by 4 is 16. In hungarian for example thats by far the most common way of saying it. Also "4 multiplied by 4", you can easily see how multiplied could be dropped to result in "4 by 4".
French speaking Belgium straight up invented new words for 70, 80, 90 because even they don't like that French bullshit
Swiss french too has cut a stop to that nonsense
Wait, i'm Swiss (german) and don't know how they count.
Septante, huitante, nonanpte
They both came about in France around the same time, just influenced by Celtic/Germanic base-20 system or the romance base-10 system. Then France standardized to the ridiculous base-20 system and Belgium and Switzerland went with the correct system.
I can only assume by your statement that they use base 12
France I guess I can see, "four score and twelve". I don't have a clue with Denmark
Danish has essentially managed to shorten "four and a half score" to what would be equivalent to saying "half to fives" in English. So it would be "two and half to fives" if we were to do the same in English. (This is also kinda similar to how the clock is read. 8:30 would be "half to nine" rather than "half past eight", which is used in English.)
In swedish 8:30 is half nine (halv nio), wonder if that's with spread.
In catalan it'd be two quarters of nine, usually shortened to quarters of nine (the two, specifically, is implied). You can also add βand fiveβ (minutes) and βminus five", so 8:20 would be a quarter and five of nine, and 8:40 three quarters minus five of nine. 8:05 would be eight and five, and 8:55 would be nine minus five.
We have a contender!
Interesting in NZ we would say half eight; for 8:30. Which when written looks really strange; but it is the shortening of half past eight. But strangely we always say quarter past eight rather than quarter eight.
8:25 would be eight twenty five.
8:35 would be twenty five to nine.
8:45 would be quarter to nine, or more uncommon is just to read out eight forty five.
Similar to how I know in portugal. But maybe I'm the weird one. Everything else going on on this thread feels super alien.
In Sweden it's also 5 to half 8 / 5 past half 8. Or 7:25/7:35.
Same thing in Norwegian, but that shouldn't be a surprise given how similar it is to Swedish.
In Russian, 5:30 is also "half of the sixth", but I still hate the Danish numbering system (which I have to live with)
I've always found that baffling. I've always said 5:30 instead, or even better, 17:30.
I think it's just a European thing because Czech has it too
It is in Dutch.
The hour that starts at 00:00 is the first hour of the day, hence 00:30 is half of that hour, or half [of] one. I think that makes sense. Not like the british who say half one and mean half past one.
Fascinating! Thanks for enlightening me
France is βFour twenty twelveβ, but if they had picked 99 it would be βfour twenty ten nineβ, which I always thought was funny.
In French, you count from 69 to 72 like "sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve". Then from 79 to 81 it goes "sixty-nineteen, four twenties, four twenties and one". Then from 89 to 91 it goes "four twenties and nine, four twenties and ten, four twenties and eleven".
It's not consistently vigesimal, though. Twenty is "vingt"*, thirty is "trente", forty is "quarante", fifty is "cinquante" and sixty is "soixante" - so far all normal. The only ones where they go all vigesimal on us are 70 (soixante-dix), 80 (quatre-vingts) and 90 (quatre-vingt-dix).
*etymologically "two-tens", if you go back beyond Latin: it's from Proto-Indo-European *dwi(hβ)dαΈ±mΜ₯ti
It is not so bad. They just have systems based in 20, not 10.
Thus, 80 is four 20s (same way you would say 'forty' that is basically 'four tens").
So 4.5 x 20 makes sense.also, they dont say the "20", it is understood.
Then a second level:
0.5 you sometimes think "halve one", and not "halve over cero".
Same way, in germanic languages they continue, so 4.5 is indeed "halve five'. See?
So to say 92, danish they say "two and halve five".
Makes sense.
Uh kind of. But when people in English say half of one, they mean the number (1 in this case) divided by 2. Not 0.5 less. So half of 5 is 2.5 not 4.5.
I do feel like if you're going to use 20 as your base, you should commit to it and say 80+12. If you're going to include fractions like 0.5, just commit to base 10 and say nine and 2.
But either way it's kind of cool and unique :)
At least we use the real billion (bi-million)
I think 99 would be a better example for France. 4x20 10 9.
I worked hard to get mine and my kids telephone numbers under 70, it's half hell otherwise.
Say 92 87 78 97:
4 20 2 4 20 7 60 10 8 4 20 10 7
Easy peasy right π, well you do get the hang of it but it's easy to mess up somewhere in the middle, especially if you do have a real 20, 10, 4 and so on.
And if you just say each digit in the phone number they look at you like you are crazy.
Or 674 986
No no, two by two!
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The Russian and Ukrainian ones aren't correct. They say "90" as something along the lines of "nine but hundred".
The tens are:
Ten
Two ten
Three ten
Sorok
Five ten
Six ten
Seven ten
Eight ten
Nine but hundred
(Plus, these all have contractions, but it's easy to hear where the words stem from)
Suddenly... Sorok!
Sorok is 40 sable furs tied together for easier countiing while trading, it is soooo obvious!
And of course, to go further into nothing making any sense:
The Finnish language took the Russian word for sable, sΓ³bol, and made a word of its own based off that: sopuli. But sopuli doesn't mean sable. It means lemming. Somebody got confused. Later they heard about sable and named it soopeli in Finnish.
Now arabs do 2+90 as well but it makes sense because they write right to left and so they write the 2 before the 90
Oh, interesting. Now I wonder, if that's why Germany and friends adopted it that way. We all imported our numerals from the arabs after all...
Yep, this is exactly why!
Slovenia is the only slavic country using German system. I was super confused shopping there. 42,41 sounds like "one and fourty and two and fourty"
Also Americans: Four score and ~~twelve~~ seven years ago, ...
Just one guy, and that was a while ago
Another interesting one is how Japan counts big numbers. There's a word/character for 10,000 (δΈ man) and large numbers are multiples of that. So a million is 100x10,000 for instance.
Large numbers aren't all multiples of δΈ (i mean, everything is a multiple of something), Japan just uses ~~the long scale~~ myriad (ie 4 zeros to the comma). So you have 10 man, 100 man, 1000 man, and after that is oku, cho, etc, all of which go to 1000 before the next number word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad
ed: long scale is apparently different from 4 zeros to the comma
What's the red one again?
Denmark. They have a weird base 20 multiplication counting system. 90: halvfems (half fifth times 20, i.e., 4.5 Γ 20) so 92 would be tooghalvfems (2 + 4.5Γ20)