Writing decimal numbers in French

In general you can't tell whether a number is in French or English just by looking at it, so you have to rely on what it says in the question.

If it were in English, "78,005" would mean "seventy eight thousand and five".

But because we're told that it's in French, it actually means "seventy eight and five thousandths". In English we write that as "78.005".

Hi Kelly,

In French ‘un point’ is used for a full stop,  the punctuation mark.

You might hear people saying ‘point barre!’  in a conversation, to mean ‘period!’ and end of conversation abruptly ...

Hope this helps!

Thanks you Cécile. So saying 1.2 million in french (1,2 millions):  "un virgule deux millions" is correct yea?

'Un virgule deux millions’ is correct but you will probably hear -

‘Un million deux cent mille’ more often i think....

Parfait, merci beaucoup  :)

Hi Robin ,

Just listened to it, it says:

Soixante six livres (£66) et cinquante pence.(50p)...

Hope this helps!

Bonjour Marnie !

In those questions, we're testing going both ways, from French numbers to English and vice-versa, as you need to be able to read numbers back and forth between the 2 languages.

So these questions are no mistake, and you do need to pay attention which language is asked of you :)

In this specific case, if the French number is "14,052", then the English will be "14.052" .

I hope that's helpful!
Bonne journée !

Bonjour Aurélie,

”14.052” is NOT the English way of writing that number.  The English way is “14,052” - the first number which you call the “French number”.  It doesn’t make sense.  I’ve seen some cases where it is correct but there are many cases where it’s back to front!

When a French person writes the number "14,052", they're using a comma to mark decimals, whereas English people would use a fullstop to mark decimals, so would change the number to "14.052".

As I said previously, we created questions going both ways inbetween English and French to test going from to the other and vice versa :)

I know that some of your questions are written correctly and do go from the correct French OR English to the other language.

BUT no ENGLISH person writes “fourteen thousand and fifty-two” as “14.05”. “14.052” would be used ONLY as the way of denoting a fraction when one number is divided by another and the result is not a whole number.  The fraction will go forever.  The English way of writing “fourteen thousand and fifty-two” is “14,052” using comma.  In your lesson on numbers you say that the French use either a space or sometimes (rarely) a period.  So if you want to as us how the French would write the number, the response you want is using either a period or a space.

In English, DECIMAL points are used ONLY in currency (in which case it would be “fourteen dollars and fifty-two cents” or “$14.52” OR in division...never in writing numbers.  So the number “one million” would be “1,000,000”; the currency “one million dollars and fifty-two cents” would be “1,000,000.53”

i see that now some English ways of writing numbers omit the comma and use a space instead.  Bur they don’t use decimal points unless as I said it’s a currency or a mathematical division.

Seethe answer marked with a green tick in this link.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/71770/usage-of-and-and-comma-when-writing-numbers-uk-style

sorry to be so nit picky on on this Aurélie but i’m an editor and am not capable of letting this go!

I agree completely with Marnie.  What is the French number "14,052" in English ? It seems pretty clear from the answer (14.052) that the question should be ,What is the English number 14,052 in French?

Hi David,

Are you talking about a specific quiz?

Hi David - we've found the offending question and we'll change it. Thanks for pointing that out!

Hi Rita,

This is what Ron suggested in a earlier question about the same topic:

You might want to try this ALT code: 
for £ British Pound 0163 Hold down the ALT button while typing 0163 should give you this: £

Hope this helps!

Hi Johnny,

It seems that the accepted rule is to put a space before the currency sign which is always after the amount ( except in accountancy).

Hope this helps!