How to Learn English Numbers (Teens, Tens, Years and Prices)

Numbers are easy to learn and hard to use quickly. In real life you hear them fast: a price, a phone number, a year, a time. The patterns are simple, but a few of them cause mistakes for almost every learner, so it is worth learning those first.

1 to 20: learn them as separate words

The numbers from one to twelve are all different words, and thirteen to nineteen end in -teen. Practise them until you do not need to think. The numbers quiz gives you a picture and a British voice for each one.

The big trap: thirteen or thirty?

The teens and the tens sound alike: 13 (thirteen) and 30 (thirty), 15 and 50, 16 and 60. The difference is the stress. In the teens, the end is strong: thir-TEEN. In the tens, the start is strong: THIR-ty. Say them aloud, exaggerating the stress, and listen for it in the audio.

21 to 99 and bigger numbers

From 21 you join the tens and the ones, with a hyphen when you write them: twenty-one, forty-seven, ninety-nine. In British English you usually say and after hundred: 150 is "one hundred and fifty", and 2,015 is "two thousand and fifteen".

Years

We usually say years in two parts: 1999 is "nineteen ninety-nine", and 1850 is "eighteen fifty". For years after 2000, both "two thousand and five" and "twenty oh five" are used for 2005.

Phone numbers and prices

• Say phone numbers one digit at a time. In British English, 0 is often said "oh": 0207 is "oh two oh seven".
• Prices: £2.50 is "two pounds fifty", and 99p is "ninety-nine pence" (or "ninety-nine p").
• Say "double" or "triple" for repeated digits: 77 is "double seven".

Ordinals: first, second, third

For order and dates, use the ordinals: first, second, third, then add -th (fourth, fifth, sixth...). Notice that fifth and twelfth change a little. In dates we say "the fifth of May", and the Calendar Run game helps with months and days.

Practise every day

• Play the English Numbers game to hear and say numbers quickly.
• Try Math in English: sums written in number words make you think in English.
• Learn to say the time with What Time Is It?.

Start with the numbers 1 to 20, then the teens against the tens. Open the numbers lesson →