A math wizard from Bangalore, India, by the name of Shakantula Devi made it to the Guinness Book of Records in 1980 when she mentally multiplied two 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds. This was the arithmetic operation she performed:
7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730
Since then, Ms. Devi had routinely beaten sophisticated computers right in their own turf. In one such contest, it took her only 50 seconds to get the 23rd root of a 21-digit number, while the computer took over a minute to perform the same job.
My point in writing about Ms. Devi’s astounding arithmetic powers isn’t really to goad lesser mortals like ourselves to try to emulate her feat, nor to shame the arithmetic-challenged among us to improve their basic computing skills, but simply to encourage people to accord more respect to numbers in their English prose.
Take note, for instance, that I didn’t write the year “1980” in the first paragraph as “The Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eighty,” that I didn’t write “13-digit” as “thirteen-digit,” and that I did not write “28 seconds” as “twenty-eight seconds.”
The grammar of numbers and time is not a science—too many national and cultural variations militate against a universal numbers-writing style—but we certainly can minimize unsightly crimes of prose innumeracy by agreeing on a basic numbers stylebook.
Let us begin with two generally accepted rules: (1) numbers from 1 to 10 should be written as words when used in a sentence: “The customer ordered
eight red shirts and
five blue ones, but returned
three browns”; and (2) numbers from 11 upwards in a sentence should be written in numerals: “The professor discovered to her dismay that 12 of her pupils were absent, and that 546 of the entire student population did not make it to their classes either.”
And if perchance the sentence has numbers ranging from 1 to any number higher than 10, the two rules above still hold even if it means mixing figures and spelled-out numbers: “We counted a total of 800 words in her essay and found
ten misspelled words and 17 wrong word choices.”
Just two notable exceptions to these rules. First, any number that starts a sentence should be written in words: “
Thirteen is considered an unlucky number by some people.” “
Five-hundred one years and six months ago, a Portuguese explorer stumbled on a group of islands on the Pacific and named it the Archipelago of St. Lazarus.” Second, when numbers are used to list a series of items within a sentence, all such numbers should be written as figures (or digits) even for numbers below 11: “This explains in detail reasons 1 to 5 of the 14 reasons why I won’t live in your city.”
Many people, of course, after writing out a number in words, indiscriminately repeat them in figures enclosed in parenthesis, as in: “I would like to discuss with you today three (3) aspects of the problem being encountered by four (4) of our regional offices.” Is this correct usage?
Definitely not; this kind of absurd overemphasis literally insults the reader and should be strictly confined to commercial or legal writing, as in writing payment checks to make it difficult for cheats to monkey around with the numbers: “Pay to Cash: Five Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Pesos Only (PhP5,260.00).”
Marking time gives us more latitude in using numbers. We can write, say, “9:00 A.M. (or a.m.)” or “nine o’clock in the morning” depending on the accuracy we want to convey. But most everybody on the planet is agreed that exact dates should be written in numbers, like “March 31, 1521.”
We use numbers all the time in our lives, so it pays to always do our numbers right.
------------------
This is a condensation of a 825-word essay that I wrote for The Manila Times
sometime in 2005.This essay, 2119th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the October 6, 2022 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2022 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay online in
The Manila Times:
The grammar of numbers and time(Next week:
Dealing with quotations and attributions – 2 parts) October 13, 2022
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
