French numbers
22
vingt-deux
23
vingt-trois
24
vingt-quatre
25
vingt-cinq
26
vingt-six
27
vingt-sept
28
vingt-huit
29
vingt-neuf
Numbers from 30 – 69
Once you’ve got that pattern nailed, it’s pretty easy to count all the way up to the sixties. Just swap vingt for one of these numbers instead:
30
trente
40
quarante
50
cinquante
60
soixante
Numbers from 70 – 99
Things get a little curlier when you reach 70, where instead of having a word for “70” in itself, you instead say “sixty-ten”, as in “sixty plus ten”.
70
soixante-dix
And then when you want to say “seventy one” you actually say “sixty eleven”, and so on up to 79.
71
soixante et onze
72
soixante-douze
73
soixante-treize
74
soixante-quatorze
75
soixante-quinze
76
soixante-seize
77
soixante-dix-sept
78
soixante-dix-huit
79
soixante-dix-neuf
A little bit strange, right? It gets even stranger. When you get to eighty, instead of having a word for eighty there’s a further bit of math involved. French speakers will say quatre-vingts — “four twenties”.
80
quatre-vingts
81
quatre-vingt-un
(Note that the “et” is left out from “quatre-vingt-un“. Just to mess with you a bit more!)
And then again, when you get to ninety it’s similar to what we did earlier with the 70s: You take a eighty and add ten. But now we’re adding it on top of those “four twenties”, so to say “ninety” you’re actually saying four-twenty-ten, four-twenty-eleven, four-twenty-twelve, etc.
90
quatre-vingt-dix
91
quatre-vingt-onze
92
quatre-vingt-douze
And then there were regional differences…
It gets even more confusing if you venture into any other French-speaking countries: In Belgium and Switzerland they use septante (seventy) instead of soixante-dix (sixty-ten) and nonante (ninety) instead of quatre-vingt-dix (four-twenty-ten). In Switzerland (but not in Belgium) they also use huitante for eighty, instead of quatre-vingts.
If these extra options seem too much to remember right now, just stick with the French-French numbers we’ve discussed. Regardless of which country you visit, these numbers will always be understood, even if they’re not conventionally used.
Numbers over 100
Once we get to 100 you can breathe a sigh of relief. Things get a bit more predictable.
100
cent
110
cent-dix
200
deux cents
250
deux cent cinquante
500
cinq cents
1,000
mille
2,000
deux mille
1,000,000
un million
