Numbers, time and dates in Spanish

A year is just a number

English splits a year into two pairs of digits. Spanish has no such form: it reads the year as the number it is, thousand, hundreds and all — mil novecientos ochenta y cuatro, dos mil veinticuatro. The paired version is not an informal alternative; it simply is not Spanish, and a listener has to work out what you meant.

mil takes no un

In English a thousand and a hundred are counted — «one thousand», «a hundred». Spanish says mil and cien on their own. A million is different, because it is a noun: un millón, and with de before what is counted — un millón de euros.

cien on its own, ciento with more after it

«Hundred» has one form in English; Spanish has two. cien stands alone or before a noun — cien euros, cien años. As soon as another number follows, it becomes ciento: ciento uno, ciento cincuenta.

The y goes between tens and units — and only there

British English puts its «and» after the hundred and joins tens and units with nothing but a hyphen. Spanish does the reverse: no y after the hundred, and a y between tens and units from thirty-one upwards — treinta y uno, noventa y nueve. Up to twenty-nine the pair is written as one word: veintidós.

veintiuno loses its o before a noun

An English number never changes with what it counts. A Spanish number ending in uno does: before a masculine noun it shortens to un — treinta y un euros, veintiún mil — and before a feminine one it becomes una: veintiuna semanas. The accent on veintiún keeps the stress where it was.

A billion is mil millones

Spanish kept the long scale. Un billón is a million millions — the English trillion — so the English billion is mil millones. It is the costliest false friend on this page: the sentence sounds perfect and is out by a factor of a thousand, which matters in a news report about a budget.

son las dos, but es la una

English keeps «it’s» whatever the hour. In Spanish the hour is the subject, feminine and plural: son las dos, son las diez. Only one o’clock is singular — es la una — and a la una for «at one».

At three is a las tres

The article belongs to the hour and does not go away after a preposition: a las tres, desde las nueve, hasta la una. Without it, a tres sounds like the start of a distance — a tres kilómetros — rather than a time.

la tarde lasts into the evening

Spanish has no word for «evening». La tarde starts after lunch and runs until well after dark, so seven o’clock is still de la tarde; de la noche belongs to the late hours. And the small hours have a name of their own, la madrugada — «three in the morning» is las tres de la madrugada. Spanish does not say «am» and «pm» out loud; these phrases do that job.

el 23 de julio, not the 23rd

Three habits at once. Spanish gives the day as a cardinal number, not an ordinal; the month takes a small letter, like the days of the week; and de links day, month and year — el veintitrés de julio de mil novecientos ochenta y cuatro. «On» disappears too: nací el veintitrés de julio, with no preposition.

tres coma catorce, not tres punto uno cuatro

Spanish writes a comma where English writes a decimal point, and says it: coma. And a short tail is read as a number rather than digit by digit — coma catorce. Only longer tails are spelt out: dos coma siete uno ocho.

1.250,50 € — the English signs swapped round

In Spain a comma never groups thousands; it marks the decimals. Thousands take a full stop — or, in the style the Real Academia recommends, a space, with none at all in a four-digit number. The currency sign goes after the amount, with a space. Written the English way, €1,250.50 reads to a Spaniard as a little over one euro.

No «double» in a Spanish phone number

A Spanish mobile number has nine digits and is usually read three plus two plus two plus two, with each pair said as a number: cuarenta y cuatro. Reading digit by digit is understood, but the English «double» has no Spanish counterpart — doble cuatro makes the listener stop writing.