Numbers, time and dates in French

Seventy is sixty-ten

After soixante the series of tens stops and French carries on counting from sixty: seventy is «sixty-ten», seventy-one «sixty-and-eleven», seventy-seven soixante-dix-sept. That is the standard in France. Belgium and Switzerland do say septante and nonante, and there they are correct — but a learner who guesses septante by analogy with English will sound Belgian in Paris at best.

Eighty is four score

French counts eighty in twenties: quatre-vingts is exactly the «fourscore» of older English. Ninety goes on from there — quatre-vingt-dix, «four twenties and ten» — and ninety-seven is quatre-vingt-dix-sept. Anyone who can count to sixty has only done the easy part.

The -s of quatre-vingts comes and goes

On its own, quatre-vingts ends in -s; as soon as another number follows, the -s goes. cent works the same way, and that one catches English speakers from the other side, because English never says «two hundreds»: in French it is deux cents, but deux cent un. The letter is silent, so the mistake only shows in writing — on a cheque, for instance.

et only before one

The English hyphen does not carry over. 21, 31, 41, 51, 61 and 71 take et and no hyphen: trente et un, soixante et onze. Every other compound under a hundred takes a hyphen and no et — and 81 and 91 take neither et nor the -s: quatre-vingt-un.

No «and» after the hundred

British English puts «and» after the hundreds; French puts nothing there at all. And the «a» of «a hundred» does not come across either: it is cent, never un cent.

mille without un, and never with -s

English counts the thousand — «one thousand», «a thousand» — and French does not. Nor does mille ever take an -s: deux mille. A million is different: it is a noun, so it takes both the article and the plural, and a de before whatever it counts — un million, deux millions de personnes.

A year is just a number

English splits a year into two pairs; French says the whole number as it stands: «one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four», without the «and». Carry the pairs over and you build a form that does not exist. From 2000 onwards the two languages agree for once: deux mille vingt-quatre is «two thousand and twenty-four», minus the «and» again.

heures is never left out

English drops «o’clock» as soon as the context makes it clear; French keeps heures every time, in speech as well as in writing. The half hour is et demie — with an -e, because the word agrees with heure.

No am and pm: timetables run to twenty-four

French has no am and pm. Appointments, timetables and opening hours are given on the twenty-four-hour clock, and people say them that way too. In conversation quatre heures et demie is fine, with de l’après-midi added if it is not obvious; what does not work is the English habit of reading the digits of a twelve-hour time.

le 23 juillet: no «-rd», no «of», no capital

Three differences at once. French dates use the cardinal number, nothing stands between the day and the month, and the month takes a small letter — as do the days of the week. Only the first of the month is an ordinal: le premier mai.

A comma, not a point

French marks decimals with a comma and says virgule. What follows the comma is usually read as a number, not digit by digit: 3,14 is trois virgule quatorze. Reading the digits out singly, as English does after «point», is not how a French speaker says it.

Space for the thousands, symbol at the end

The English separators are exactly the wrong way round: French groups thousands with a space and puts a comma before the cents. In French, 1,250 is one and a quarter. The currency symbol goes after the amount, with a space in front of it.

Phone numbers in pairs

A French number has ten digits and is read as five pairs, each said as a number rather than as two digits — and «double nine» has no French equivalent. A nought is zéro, never «oh». This is where the numbers up to 99 have to be automatic: the pairs from seventy upwards are the long ones.