In German, we often use "Elfhundert" (literally, "eleven hundred") for 1100 or "neunzehnhundert" ("nineteen hundred") for 1900; but is this correct in English?
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Just a brief nitpick, but in the title it should read "More than 9 hundred ... "– user13673Dec 16, 2014 at 21:11
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2 Answers
Yes, people normally say
fifteen hundred instead of one thousand five hundred
and
nineteen ninety nine instead of one thousand nine hundred ninety nine
However, I hear a lot of people saying
two thousand fourteen instead of twenty fourteen
Probably because twenty fourteen just doesn't flow off the tongue as nicely as years back in the nineteen nineties
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4@MaulikV It's fine in American English, too, but I think in AmE "twenty fourteen" is the most common way to say it informally.– user230Jul 30, 2014 at 16:10
Correct or not, it's relatively common in English to refer to numbers between 1100 and 9900 (that end in 00) as "eleven hundred" to "ninety-nine hundred". However, you would never go any higher and call 10100 "a hundred-and-one hundred".
If you're in the teens range, it's also acceptable to call numbers like 1378 "thirteen hundred and seventy-eight", but once you go above 1900, you generally wouldn't use that form on a number that's not an even multiple of 100, unless you're talking about a year: so you can refer to the year 2112 as "twenty-one twelve", but if you have 2112 points in a game, you have "two thousand, one hundred and twelve points", or "over twenty-one hundred points", but I would not expect you to say that you have "twenty-one hundred and twelve points".
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2Instances of four digit numbers being spoken as two two digit numbers also include room numbers, portions of phone or credit card numbers, and, in general, cases where numbers are used as identifiers rather than for counting. Jul 30, 2014 at 18:03
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In the US, four-digit house numbers are almost always parsed as two two-digit numbers (except, of course, even hundreds and even thousands). But people trip up on five-digit addresses. IAa "block" never contains houses numbered past 99—the "thousands" "ten thousands" and "hundred thousands" places always signify the near cross-street. Aug 26, 2015 at 10:16
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So "22526" should parse as "two twenty-five twenty-six" (or "two-two-five-two-six"), but some try to make it "twenty-two five twenty-six" Which strikes me as weird. It's as if they're trying to describe the five hundred twenty-sixth house in the twenty-two hundred block, rather than the twenty-sixth house in the two-twenty-five hundred block. Aug 26, 2015 at 10:16