This is a silly, inconsequential and probably really stupid question, but it was just something that occurred to me. I currently have a part-time job where each employee has a four-digit employee number. I’ve noticed that when referring to this number, everyone instinctively breaks it up into a set of two separate two-digit numbers. For instance, my number is 6984. This is referred to as “sixty-nine eighty-four” - that is, we parse it as “69-84”. We also do it with, say, years. The year 1984 is “nineteen eighty-four”. Actually, it seems that we do it with longer numbers, too, like phone numbers. An eight-digit phone number is typically referred to as four separate two-digit numbers. What’s the deal with this? Is there some deep psychological reason why we do this, or is it just that it’s the simplest and quickest way to say a number?
Technically, it wouldn’t be the quickest way to say a number, because it requires more syllables to use the 2-digiters than to say each digit individually.
I think we just like to group things together. You know, the whole order out of chaos thing.
Just a WAG, but sixty-nine eighty-four rolls off the tongue far easier than six thousand nine hundred eighty four.
If I interpret the OP correctly, this seems less the issue than why not say “six-nine-eight-four”?
Maybe, but “six nine eight four” rolls off the tongue even easier than “sixty-nine eighty-four.”
We are used to grouping 4 digits into 2 sets. We do it every day with dates. Seems natural that we would tend to treat any 4 digit number as a “year.”
I just noticed on our local newscasts the ABC TV station started referring to years in other formats
They will say TWENTY–Oh-SIX, while others still say Two THOUSAND-SIX
Even with phone numbers. After the dash the four numbers are as often as not given as two two-digit ones, instead of as four individual digits. At least in these parts they do.
It’s as common to say 259-6685 as “two-five-nine, sixty-six eighty-five” as it is to say “two-five-nine, six-six-eight-five” even though the second way actually reduces the number of syllables.
I believe it has to do with our tendency to count in groups rather than one-at-a-time. Whenever I’m counting stuff I try to grab them in groups of five (or two or three). Five is about as large a group as I can distinguish as a set without having to count them individually, but I can count out 100 or more objects in batches of five way faster than one at a time.
because I got four brain cells still working, and they paired up.
It’s a process called “chunking”, in which you group smaller pieces of information into larger ones, which you can then remember as a unit. It’s the reason why phone numbers are broken up the way they are. This Wikipedia article has a very basic description of it, but for real information you may need to delve into a memory & cognition text.
Not really, it’s stilted speech. Whereas as adding the “ee” at the end of the six and eight allow for natural transitions to the next syllable. If you pay close attention, you actually say the “six” and the “eight” a little differrently with the suffix and the whole thing does indeed roll along easier.
Because we’re not talking about numbers per se. We’re talking about identifiers. You’d probably never, ever say that you have sixty-four ninety-five goats in your herd; you’d either say sixty-four hundred, ninety-five or six thousand, four hundred ninety five.
If it’s a number that has to be remembered, like a phone number or address, I find it much easier, in general, to remember two 2-digit numbers than four 1-digit numbers or one 4-digit number.
Especially dates, which are broken down into century and year: we can remember “nineteen eighty-four” better than “one nine eight four.”
Of course there are exceptions. “one two three four” is easier to remember than “twelve-thirty-four.” And “two thousand” is easier than any alternative.
Good point, although it would probably be more accurate to say ‘we’re not talking about quantifiers, we’re talking about raw numbers’. Raw numbers are always easier to remember when grouped in chunks up to about six. If asked, I can reel off a minimum of ten account and pin numbers from memory, including my wife’s SSN. Years are anomalies for this, since technically a year is a quantifier of A.D. or other calendar system. In that case, it’s just become convention to say nineteen ninety three. At present, most are saying ‘two thousand six’, but will probably revert to custom sometime between 2010 and 2015, tops.
I should have noted that this is true in English. Other languages don’t necessarily do this. In Spanish, for example, one doesn’t say diez y nueve, ochenta y seis (19-86) for 1986; one says mil novecientos ochenta y seis, or 1,986. I’d be willing to bet that a pin numbers and such are said one number at a time.
That’s what I came in here to say. The average person can concentrate on about seven “chunks” of information at a time, regardless of their content (up to some limit, any way). Treating a four-digit number as two chunks of two digits each makes it much easier to hold in short-term memory than it would be as four chunks.
American English, perhaps.
I don’t think it’s necessarily even a language-dependent thing, but rather a culture and habit-based one; as far as I know, there is no particular tendency to group numbers into any consistent-sized groups here in my part of the world (southern England). Year dates are an exception to this, so I’ll come back to those in a minute, but 9287 would probably just be spoken as “nine-two-eight-seven” here 923467 might be broken into “nine-two-three, four-six-seven” and 92834167 might be broken into two groups of four: “nine-two-eight-three, four-one-six-seven”.
That’s if they are non-value numbers, such as PINs or telephone numbers; if there is a definite sense of value, then the number will usually be spoken in its proper (local) form, so 92,834,167 would be “ninety-two million, eight hundred and thirty-four thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven” (the inclusion of those 'and"s being very much the norm in Britain).
Dates are typically broken into two numbers, so 1984 is “nineteen eighty-four”, but that might just be because we tend to think of decades and centuries as distinct entities, one happening in nested form within the other…
Yes, and either way it’s pretty cumbersome. Spanish isn’t known for conciseness of speech.
For PIN and telephone numbers (non-quantitive identifiers) they (in Mexico anyway) do do grouping. Years, as you mentioned, are spelt out as a proper number. But a phone number such as 717-1625 will often be read as siete diezisiete, dieziseis, veintecinco. Heck, they don’t even write their numbers that way most of the time; in this example you’d probably see 7 17 16 25 written on office supplies or whatnot.
I think the advantage that Spanish has over other languages is that anything a girl says in Spanish sounds nice, up to and including loudly shouted obscenities about your mother and a bodily function 
Kinda like the country song goes: “I don’t know what she’s saying, but I like how she said it!”