David Cantrell wrote:
> And in any case, I can think of three different ways of saying 1821 in
> English alone.
>
> One thousand eight hundred and twenty one
> One thousand eight hundred twenty one
> Eighteen hundred and twenty one
>
> As far as *I* am concerned, the middle one is wrong (although I believe it
> is considered correct in some parts of the world), and whether to use the
> first or the thrid form would depend on context.
At the grade school I attended here in the United States, I was taught that
the first and third forms would represent the number 1800.21 -- the "and" is
used to represent a decimal point or the beginning of a fraction (as in "one
and one quarter" or "one and two thirds"). And there is a good bit of
ambiguity without a trailing "hundredths", because it could be "thousandths"
or even "millionths". My grade school teacher would also have required that
all of the listed forms have a hyphen between "twenty" and "one". The only
other form acceptable to my grade school teacher would be
Eighteen hundred twenty-one
No doubt you attended a different grade school. You do make the good point
that without universal knowledge and correct application of the one proper
rule for numeric conversions (whatever it might be) the sort order for numbers
embedded in text might surprise some people.
--
Glenn
=====
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