English Vocabulary

Numbers in English

There are two main types of numbers:

Cardinal Numbers - 1 (one), 2 (two) etc. (Used mainly for counting)

Ordinal Numbers - 1st (first), 2nd (second) etc. (Used mainly for putting things in a sequence)

Cardinal Numbers

Cardinal numbers are normally used when you:
count things: I have two brothers. There are thirty-one days in January.
give your age: I am thirty-three years old. My sister is twenty-seven years old.
give your telephone number: Our phone number is two-six-three, three-eight-four-seven. (481-2240)
give years: She was born in nineteen seventy-five (1975). America was discovered in fourteen ninety-two

Notice how we divide the year into two parts. This is the form for year up to 1999. For the year 2000 and on, we say two thousand (2000), two thousand and one (2001), two thousand and two (2002) etc.

Ordinal Numbers

You can normally create Ordinal numbers by adding -TH to the end of a Cardinal Number.

Ordinal numbers are normally used when you:
give a date: My birthday is on the 27th of January. (Twenty-seventh of January)
put things in a sequence or order: Liverpool came second in the football league last year.
give the floor of a building: His office is on thetenth floor.
have birthdays: He had a huge party for histwenty-first birthday.
refer to centuries: Shakespeare was born in the16th century.

For the name of a king or queen in written English, Roman numerals are used = Henry VIII

but in Spoken English you would say Henry the Eighth.

Cardinal Numbers

* Instead of saying One Hundred, you can say A hundred.
e.g. (127) one hundred and twenty-seven OR (127) a hundred and twenty-seven.
The same rule applies for one thousand (a thousand) and one million (a million)
Notice that you need to use a hyphen (-) when you write the numbers between 21 and 99.
With long numbers, we usually divide them into groups of three which are divided by a comma. e.g. 5000000 (5 million) is normally written as 5,000,000

Ordinal Numbers