German Numbers: 1 to 100, einundzwanzig and the Big Ones

German numbers look friendly for the first twelve and then do one strange thing: from 21 onwards they say the number back to front. einundzwanzig is one-and-twenty, and siebenundvierzig is seven-and-forty, all written as a single word. Everything else in the system follows from a handful of building blocks, so the job is to learn about thirty words and one habit of listening.

This article builds German numbers up from nought to a trillion, shows how the pieces join, and covers the traps that catch English speakers: the letters that vanish from sechzehn and siebzig, the difference between eins and ein, and the Billion that is a thousand times bigger than yours.

Null to zwölf: the words to learn

The first thirteen numbers are words of their own. There is no pattern to lean on, so learn them as a list:

Most of these are visibly the English word with a German accent, because they are the same word: drei and three, acht and eight, elf and eleven, zwölf and twelve. The ones to practise aloud are zwei, which rhymes with high and starts with a ts sound, and sechs, which is said zex, with a z sound at the front and ks at the end.

The teens: the unit plus zehn

From thirteen to nineteen German does exactly what English does: the unit, then ten.

Two of them lose letters, and these are the spelling mistakes German teachers see most. sechzehn drops the s of sechs: it is not sechszehn. And siebzehn drops the -en of sieben: it is not siebenzehn. The dropped letters change the sound too. The ch of sechs is part of a ks sound, but in sechzehn it is the soft ch of ich.

The tens: -zig, and one ß

The tens add -zig to the unit, which is the same ending as English -ty:

Three of them need watching. zwanzig is not zweizig: the two has changed shape, though the family resemblance still shows. dreißig is the only ten spelt with ß instead of -zig, a quirk of history you simply have to learn. And sechzig and siebzig shrink in exactly the same way as their teens: no s in sechzig, no -en in siebzig.

The -ig at the end is said like the ch in ich in standard German, so zwanzig sounds like tsvan-tsich. In the south of Germany, Austria and Switzerland you will hear a k instead. Both are correct; pick one and stay consistent.

21 to 99: the unit comes first

This is the part that feels strange. German builds 21 to 99 by saying the unit, then und, then the ten, and writes the whole thing as one word:

Notice that the unit keeps its full form: sechsundsechzig has its s at the front and loses it at the back, and siebenundvierzig keeps the -en of sieben. Only the ten shrinks.

English used to count this way. Four-and-twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie, and older speakers still say five-and-twenty past. German simply kept the habit, and so did Dutch and Danish.

The difficulty is not saying these numbers but hearing them. When someone reads out a phone number or a price, your brain starts writing the first thing it hears, and it hears the unit first.

The practical trick is to stop fighting the order and write the digits the way they arrive: when you hear siebenundvierzig, put the 7 down with a space in front of it, then fill in the 4. People who deal with German numbers all day do exactly this, and after a few weeks the reversal stops registering.

eins or ein?

One is the only number that changes shape. eins is the number used on its own:

• when counting: null, eins, zwei, drei
• at the end of a longer number: hunderteins, 101
• as an answer on its own, or a digit read aloud: null eins sechs

The moment anything follows it inside a number, it drops the s: einundzwanzig, einunddreißig, einhundert, eintausend. There is no einsundzwanzig. The same goes for the time: one o'clock is ein Uhr, though the hour said alone is eins.

And in front of a noun, one is not really a number at all. It is the article ein, and it takes the gender and case of the noun like any other article: ein Mann, eine Frau, ein Kind, mit einem Mann.

German does not distinguish a man from one man, so Ich habe ein Kind means I have a child and I have one child. If you need to stress the number, stress the word when you say it. The full set of forms is in German articles, and the case that turns ein into einem is in German cases.

zwo: two on the phone

You will hear zwo for zwei on the phone, in station announcements, at the bank counter and in the army. It exists because zwei and drei sound too alike on a bad line, so zwo gives two a vowel of its own. It is perfectly standard German, and you can use it whenever you are reading out a number that has to survive a noisy room. You will rarely see it written down.

Phone numbers themselves are usually read digit by digit, or in pairs: zweiundvierzig dreiundachtzig for 42 83. Both are normal, and the pairs are where the unit-first habit bites hardest.

Hundreds and thousands: one long word

hundert or einhundert is 100: the plain form is what people say, and the ein is added for clarity, on cheques and in careful speech. The hundreds are the unit plus hundert, with no und after it:

You will also hear hundertundeins for 101; the und after the hundreds is optional in speech and usually left out in writing. The only und that is not optional is the one between the unit and the ten.

Every number below a million is written as a single word, which is why zweitausendvierhundertneunzig looks like a practical joke. It is the same instinct that builds German compound nouns, covered in German compound nouns. In real life almost nobody writes these out: cheques, contracts and grammar articles are the main places you meet them. Read them by chopping at tausend and hundert, and the monster falls apart into zwei-tausend, vier-hundert, neunzig.

Million, Milliarde and the Billion trap

From a million up, the numbers stop being adjectives and become nouns, so they are capitalised, feminine, and have a plural:

• eine Million, zwei Millionen
• eine Milliarde, drei Milliarden

Because they are nouns, they are written apart from the rest of the number: zwei Millionen dreihunderttausend is 2,300,000. And there is no of: a million people is eine Million Menschen.

Now the trap. English billion, a thousand million, is eine Milliarde in German. The German Billion is a million million, what English calls a trillion. German uses the long scale, the one Britain itself used until the 1970s, so every German news report about a budget in Milliarden is talking about English billions. Translate Billion as billion and you have made a figure a thousand times too big.

Commas, points and money

German swaps the comma and the point. The decimal marker is a comma, read as Komma: 3,5 is drei Komma fünf. Thousands are separated by a point or a thin space, so 1.000 and 1 000 both mean a thousand, not one point nought.

Prices are read with the currency in the middle: 2,50 € is zwei Euro fünfzig. Euro does not change in the plural when you count money, so ten euros is zehn Euro.

Years

Years up to 1999 are said in hundreds, like English, but with no and: 1990 is neunzehnhundertneunzig, nineteen hundred ninety. From 2000 onwards they are said as ordinary thousands: 2020 is zweitausendzwanzig, and 2001 is zweitausendeins.

German does not put in in front of a bare year. In 2020 translates as 2020 on its own or im Jahr 2020, never in 2020, which is one of the surest signs of English showing through.

Ordinals: first, second, third

Ordinals are brief. Up to 19 you add -te to the number, and from 20 onwards you add -ste:

• zweite, vierte, fünfte, zehnte, neunzehnte
• zwanzigste, einundzwanzigste, hundertste

Four are irregular: erste (first), dritte (third), siebte (seventh) and achte (eighth, not achtte). You will also meet the longer siebente, which is correct but old-fashioned.

Ordinals take the same endings as any adjective, so the first day is der erste Tag and on the first day is am ersten Tag; the pattern is in German adjective endings.

In writing, the ordinal is a number with a full stop after it: 1. Mai is der erste Mai, and on 3 October is am dritten Oktober. This -te and -ste pattern is on the AQA GCSE German specification at Foundation and Higher tier.

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Learn null to zwölf, then the teens and the tens: about thirty words build every number to a million.
2. Have someone read out prices or phone numbers and write the digits down unit first.
3. Run the drill on this page until the spellings come without thinking.

The German course teaches the numerals in three short lessons, nought to nine, the teens, and the tens with hundert, and then drills how they combine.