Number to Words

The words exist to fix the amount so the figures cannot be altered afterwards, which is why the two lines must agree exactly. The usual pattern is the whole amount, then the fraction, then the currency: four hundred seventy-three dollars and fifty cents. Many people close the line with the word only and rule through the remaining space so nothing can be added after it. Neither of those is produced here — what comes out is plain text, and the only, the ruled line and any capitalisation your bank prefers are yours to add. Fill in the date and the payee before the amount; a signed cheque with a blank line is the thing worth worrying about.

Both are correct English, belonging to different conventions. British usage puts and before the tens in anything above a hundred — one hundred and twenty pounds — and that is what a British cheque normally carries. American usage drops it, so the same figure reads one hundred twenty. The word lists here follow the American pattern and never insert and, which matters if the line is going on a cheque in the UK, Ireland, India or Australia: you will be adding it by hand at every hundred boundary. There is one place and does appear, and that is the currency reading, where it separates the whole amount from the cents rather than the hundreds from the tens.

The fraction over one hundred is the older convention and still the commonest on printed cheque stock in the United States: the whole amount in words, then the cents as a fraction, as in seventy-three and 56/100. Words for the cents are accepted almost everywhere too and are easier to read back. What you should not do is drop the cents from a figure that has them, or write the fraction over some other denominator. The currency reading here gives the words form only, so if your stock is printed for the fraction you convert the last two digits yourself — which is arithmetic you can do in your head, since those digits are already in front of you.

The Indian system groups digits differently: past the first thousand it counts in lakh, a hundred thousand, and crore, ten million, and it punctuates as 12,34,567 rather than 1,234,567. Twelve lakh thirty-four thousand five hundred sixty-seven is what a bank in India expects, and it is not what the short scale produces — the same figure comes out here as one million two hundred thirty-four thousand five hundred sixty-seven, because the scale names available are thousand, million, billion and trillion. There is no lakh or crore option. For an Indian cheque, regroup the digits yourself and treat the output as a check on your arithmetic rather than as the line to copy.

The rule that survives everywhere is to hyphenate the compound numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine and nothing else. Twenty-one, forty-two and eighty-seven take a hyphen; one hundred, three thousand and two million do not, and no hyphen goes between the hundred and what follows it. That is exactly the behaviour here — a hyphen is inserted only between a tens word and a ones word, so four hundred twenty-two carries one hyphen rather than two. Fractions written out take a hyphen as well, as in two-thirds, but that is a separate rule and nothing here produces fractions. Ordinals inherit from the cardinal, so twenty-first keeps its hyphen.

A billion is a thousand million on the short scale, now standard across English including Britain, where it once meant a million million. The long scale survives in several European languages, so a figure translated out of French or German can be wrong by a factor of a thousand. Above trillion the short scale runs quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, though the names get vague enough that most writing switches to digits or powers of ten. That is roughly where this stops as well: the scale names end at trillion, so the largest figure it will spell has fifteen digits before the decimal point, and anything longer is refused with a message rather than quietly truncated.

No request leaves the page. The conversion is arithmetic over word lists that arrived with the page itself, so there is no call to make and nothing on any server to log. Nothing is written into the browser either — no history of what you converted before, no saved list, nothing restored on your next visit, so reloading leaves an empty box. That matters more here than the subject suggests, because the figures people spell out are usually salaries, settlement sums and cheque amounts rather than abstract quantities, and a number like that is worth as little exposure as possible.

It has to be a plain figure. A pound or dollar sign, a space between digit groups, a stray letter, a second decimal point or a percent sign all produce the message asking for a valid number, and so does a lone minus sign or a figure ending on the decimal point. Scientific notation such as 1e6 is not read as a number here. Commas are the exception and are removed before anything is checked, so a figure pasted straight from a spreadsheet works as it stands. The other refusal is length: more than fifteen digits ahead of the decimal point is rejected as too large, and leading zeros count towards that fifteen even though they never reach the words.