I have noticed that some Europeans would report numbers as 4.500 to represent “four thousand five hundred”, 1.000 to express “one thousand,” rather than using commas. Is this typical in Europe?
Yes. And they use a comma where we would use a dot, for the decimal point
Scientists just put a space between every third digit. Then they can use either a dot or a comma for the decimal point, (hopefully) without confusion.
U.S.: 1,000,000.000,000,
Europe: 1.000.000,000.000
Scientific: 1 000 000.000 000 or 1 000 000,000 000
It varies by country.
1,000.00
1 000,00
1 000’00
And other options.
More info:
And more:
I don’t recall ever seeing commas used after the decimal point.
Tangent that nobody asked about:
There are other ways of grouping the digits. South Asian countries use the Indian Numbering System, where the commas go here:
12,34,56,789
Group of 3 at the bottom, then groups of two.
We are used to speaking of Thousands and Millions.
In this alternate system, the first comma is Thousands, but the second comma is Lakh (100 thousand) and the third comma is Crore (10 million).
I learned about this in dealing with co-workers who might talk about a database issue saying “we found approximately 3 lakh duplicate records in the order line item table” translation: 300,000.
1 lakh = 100,000
I’m a retired German programmer, and the different decimal separators have always been one of the nuisances when writing programs for different markets, just like the different time and date formats.
Well, Oxford has all the commas. And they ain’t giving them out to just anybody.
Yes, in my neck of woods we use a comma for non-integers and a point as a thousands separator but 1.000 is rarely if ever used: it’s a smallish number and the point will only be used for tens or hundreds of thousands or above.
However, the US system is also very common. I’ve never seen a software version “2,0”.
But it’s all rubbish anyway. Thousands separator is just a visual aid and should be expressed with empty spaces, IMHO. That way, it doesn’t matter if you’re using s comma or a dot for fractions. (save for programming which requires precise syntax)
To the contrary, I thought it was the fact that Oxford is willing to drop its grammatical pants and promiscuously distribute commas willy-nilly that rubbed people the wrong way.
Fantastic band name.
It’s a matter of language rather than culture. When writing in English, then a point is not a correct thousands separator, even if written in Europe by a European; things are different in other languages. The European Commission style guide for writing English requires either a space or a comma as thousands separator and a point as a decimal separator in English, even though many other EU languages have different usage.
Yes, that is the usual way to write large numbers in Europe. Of course. And the UK is not Europe. They don’t want to. There may be a link with imperial measurement systems.
Yeah, that one threw me for a loop when I was in India about ten years ago. The first time I saw it in a newspaper, I thought perhaps there was a typo. But then I kept seeing that usage and wondered whether I’m supposed to interpret it as just separating a large number in a different way, or it maybe meant something else. Then came “lakh” and “crore” which I eventually googled. It is rather jarring when you’re used to setting everything off by threes, that’s for sure.
Somebody might find this UK metric style guide interesting. I was surprised to see the recommendation of using spaces instead of commas in numbers of five or more digits.
Usage of the point as thousands separator “in Europe” is non-uniform. Switzerland traditionally uses an apostrophe: 10’000.
Really, they still do it today? TIL, thanks a lot! It looks quite good actually, and avoids confusion with , and . - I like it.
I’ve used several calculators that use apostrophes for separators. I figure it’s an LCD placement issue rather than a stylistic choice.
Another reason to use just spaces for the separators is because you might have something like a list of numbers, where the different numbers are separated by commas.
The really odd one here is this:
- Historically, in Germany and Austria, thousands separators were occasionally denoted by alternating uses of comma and point, e.g. 1.234,567.890,12 for “eine Milliarde 234 Millionen …”, but this is never seen in modern days and requires explanation to a contemporary German reader.