What is the origin for why many will spell out AND show numbers in the text of a document? For example, …“I have five (5) toes.”… I was hoping for a factual answer, else we can WAG all day long. Could it have started with legalese when we once mailed-in three (3) proofs of purchase seals? Sorry, but I’d really like to know who insists on doing this and why. So unnecessary.
No one (1) that I know does this - can you show an example from a recent document?
Generally, it’s to avoid misunderstandings. For example, if I put 233 (twenty-three dollars) then it's clear that the second "3" is a typo. It can also be a way to prevent someone from making alterations. If a coupon says says 5 off, someone might try to write a “1” in between the $ and the 5 so now it says $15 off, but if it’s also written out “five dollars off” then it’s a lot harder to change “five” to “fifteen”.
Another source of misunderstanding is people who don’t speak a language fluently. I was in a restaurant in France when the waiter told me the price of an item from the menu but he was speaking French and even though I clearly heard the word he used, I couldn’t remember if that was the French word for thirty or the French word for thirteen. But if I saw it written with Arabic numerals “30” then there’d be no confusion.
Previous threads discussing this question:
Bryan Garner says it’s a holdover from the days of handwritten legal documents, when numerals could easily be altered or might just be illegible.
Come to think of it, I wrote my first cheque this year to pay a gardner. I wrote the amount both ways as always, to stop anyone from altering it.
Also recall that there are two word styles. The one used in the US (and I believe most of the world now) is what was once called the French system. In that system one million is 1,000,000 and one billion is 1,000,000,000 (Yes I know not all countries use commas as the separators. It’s the number of zeros that matters.) In the (old) British system 1,000,000,000 was a thousand million and a billion was 1,000,000,000,000 or a million million. This continued on up so that a trillion was a million billion rather than a thousand billion.
It prevents alteration. If you write a document: “I will pay you $1,” that’s easily altered to read “I will pay you $1000” (if you write small enough).