please help me explain to a non-native english speaker when to say "five hundred sixty" as opposed to "five hundred and sixty".
she was told by a british person that leaving the "and" out makes it wrong. i told her that i say it both ways, and mostly prefer the "and" as well, but without is also acceptable in certain situations. now i need to explain myself and i can´t. help! *************************************************************** 03-15-03, 01:47 PM Monsterquizzer I can think of no circumstances in which a native speaker of British English would ever omit the "and" here. On the other hand, I suspect users of American English would rarely include it. To answer your question, therefore, I would say it depends entirely on which variety of the language you are trying to impart as to which is "correct".
03-15-03, 02:09 PM Tree I would DEFINATELY use "and"
03-15-03, 02:24 PM maiku I'm sure you're quite correct, MQ, about British usage. But omitting the "and" in pronouncing numbers like 560 (510, 520, etc. would work equally well as examples) is the exception in American usage, too.
Hassia is a native speaker of English, and we should take her at her word when she says she sometimes includes the "and" and sometimes not. I'm pretty sure the same is true of my own American usage.
For one thing, I might well have omitted the "and" in any citation of a number in answer to a question posed by my high school geometry or trigonometry teachers. Teacher: "How many degrees are there in the first three quadrants." Me: Two hundred seventy?
I assume we all know that we're not talking about cases were the 560 is the initial part of some larger number, say 560,350. Here, I would always omit the first "and" and say "five hundred sixty thousand, three hundred...." But I may or may not want to include an "and" directly before the "fifty," sort of depending on how the mood took me.
In general, I'd say that omission of the "and" would be favored sometimes in oral discussion of a technical nature, less favored elsewhere.
03-15-03, 04:49 PM FredPuli The British never say 'five hundred sixty' whatever the education, background or region of the speaker. However, in giving numbers in a list of stock prices, for example, we do say 'five sixty'.This practice avoids errors in recording or transmission as inserting 'hundred'or 'thousand' adds a word which makes a big difference to a deal if it's misheard !There are other examples of Americans 'omitting' a word. You say 'A player protests a decision', 'The defence protested the Judge's ruling'. We say 'protest against' or 'about' depending on the circumstances ( 'against' suggests an appeal to a higher authority is likely, 'about' suggests dissatisfaction but may indicate some resignation ). Another example which jolts my smooth reading is any American journalist writing 'The President announced his plan, Thursday'. We say and write 'on Thursday'. This sounds even odder to me in broadcasts, as Thursday often sounds like some special type of day e.g A Work Thursday ( 'He went to work Thursday' or even a person e.g.'Blue' Thursday ( 'He was feeling blue Thursday') and many more. Wasn't it Daniel Defoe who created Man Friday or was that The Almighty? ( I forget my Old Testament ).Perhaps they both did.
[This message was edited by FredPuli on 03-15-03 at 04:58 PM.]
03-15-03, 06:27 PM Prothero Five hundred and sixty or five hundred sixty = same number. To omit the word "and" does not make it wrong unless the meaning is altered, which in this case it doesn't seem to be. The use of the word "and" is excess baggage that just happens to sound correct, or more complete to some. I personally prefer it without "and" as it sounds more concise. To use "and" always makes it sound (to me) as if there is some separation between the figures ~ that sixty is being added for some purpose beyond the statement, such as I paid back the five hundred I owed the bank, plus the sixty in interest. I certainly wouldn't say "fifty and six" when referring to fifty six of anything and can't grasp the correctness of doing so in the hundreds. Also, having attended a course in fraud and fogery I learned that the use of the word "and" on a check is an invitation for skillful alteration ~ a highly unlikely, but possible occurance for the average indivdual account. Maybe it was the samples shown to the class that convinced me to omit "and" on checks and in speaking.
Yet I have sometimes found myself using the "and" in describing such numbers and would never suggest someone using it is "wrong."
03-16-03, 11:31 AM maiku Making out a check this morning, I recalled that Americans normally omit the "and" on the line where the amount is written out in words (though we include an "and" before the cents part.) I won't tell you how much the check was for, nor to whom it was payable, nor for what purpose, but if it had been for $560, I would have written "five hundred sixty and 00/100."
I've cashed traveler's checks in the UK before, but I've never written one of my own there. What is the practice in the UK in this case?
03-16-03, 02:15 PM Monsterquizzer Again, I've never known of any British-English speaker/writer omitting the 'and' in such numbers. That holds true for cheque-writing, too. We do, of course, in financial situations, have 'cheques' and not 'checks'! (I suppose we have financial 'checks' as well, but only when we're trying to work out whether we can afford something.)
03-16-03, 03:19 PM Ewood27 For cheque-writing I follow the advice my bank gave me years ago. For a sum of £560.00 I would write the words as 'Five hundred and sixty pounds only', starting as far to the left as possible and leaving absolute minimum spaces between words.
If there were any pence, say £560.25, it would be 'Five hundred and sixty pounds 25'.
I would not omit the 'and'.
03-16-03, 04:51 PM FredPuli Thinking of ' fifty and six' it certainly was once a practice to say 'four and twenty' as well as 'twenty- four' . There is a nursery rhyme, 'Sing a song of sixpence' which contains the lines 'Four and twenty blackbirds/ Baked in a pie'. There seems no reason to suppose this did not apply to other numbers between twenty and one hundred . Incidentally and in contrast, back in 1863 there was a certain American who began a speech 'Fourscore and seven years ago' and the normal lifespan of man is said to be 'threescore years and ten'in Psalm 90 of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as well,
03-28-03, 09:50 PM cattywampus When I was in school - yes! I was in school! We were taught that "five hundred sixty dollars" meant $560 and in the case of "five hundred sixty dollars and ten cents, "and" took the place of the decimal. Have they changed it now again?
Catty Razz
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