Popular Misconceptions

An e-mail I received contained the following in a list of amazing facts:

Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter “A”?
A. One thousand

Basically, the fact points out the somewhat trivial observation that if you spell out all the numbers in plain english, in order, you don’t find the letter ‘A’ until you get to the number 1000:

1 - one
2 - two
3 - three
4 - four
5 - five
…
1000 - one thousAnd

The first thing any pedant would point out, is that this would only be true of English, or more precisely, standard English and standard spelling.

A more obvious response though, if you both to start to figure out the answer in your head, is that a much lower number than 1000 seems to contain an ‘A’: ‘one hundred and one’. Why doesn’t this count? It’s a good question, and the only possible retort is unbelievably pedantic:

The “and” is only used in naming numbers by placing it between a whole number and a fraction. For example 3 and 1/4. 101 is correctly written and spoken as “one hundred one”. (Taken from Yahoo! Answers but also given as a reason on numerous other pages)

This quote suggests that the ‘one hundred one’ usage is more correct, but notions of ‘correctness’ in language are notoriously misconceived. There’s no one authority telling people how they should and shouldn’t pronounce certain numbers, after all, language is governed by consensus, and even then there’s room for divergences (accents, dialects, and so on). Even if you replace ‘correctly’ in the quote with ‘more standardly’, it’s still patently wrong. Just about everyone would naturally say ‘one hundred and one’ rather than the cumbersome sounding ‘one hundred one’. The only exception might be in scientific or mathematical fields, but even there it’s more likely that numbers are written down and infrequently read out.

So, this is yet another popular misconception, and rather a boring one at that. After all, is it really all that significant that the letter A isn’t used in the standard spelling of the standard way of pronouncing numbers until you reach either 101 or 1000? One the surface it’s surprising, because that’s a lot of words, and ‘A’ is relatively frequent, but in speaking numbers you’re pretty much using the same words over and over again. In fact, with just 34 words, you can count all the way up to 1,000,000,000,000,000. Here’s the list of words, with the number indicating the point at which they’re first used:

1 - one
2 - two
3 - three
4 - four
5 - five
6 - six
7 - seven
8 - eight
9 - nine
10 - ten
11 - eleven
12 - twelve
13 - thirteen
14 - fourteen
15 - fifteen
16 - sixteen
17 - seventeen
18 - eighteen
19 - nineteen
20 - twenty
30 - thirty
40 - forty
50 - fifty
60 - sixty
70 - seventy
80 - eighty
90 - ninety
100 - hundred
101 - and
1000 - thousand
1000000 - million
1000000000 - billion
1000000000000 - trillion
1000000000000000 - quadrillion

(This is using the American style of numbering)

From this you can see that the letter ‘m’ isn’t used until we reach a million, the letter ‘b’ isn’t used until a billion, and the letter ‘q’ isn’t used until a quadrillion. By this point, you might think we’ve used all 26 letters of the English alphabet, but no, there’s still 5 unused. Of these, ‘p’ gets used in ’septillion (that’s 10²⁴, in case you didn’t know), ‘c’ gets used in ‘octillion’ (that’s 10²⁷) and ‘z’ can arguably be said to have been used in ‘zero’, but that still leaves j and k as unused. Sadly, there seems to be no ‘jillion’ or ‘killion’ numbers yet invented.

So there we go - not only have we dubunked a fairly trivial ‘fact’, we’ve also discovered a load of new ones. Interesting? Not hugely, but there we go…