Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 May 23

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May 23

Nineteen hundred

When did the use of hundred for years above 1000 in English and/or German start? Was it in use before the year 1100? 31.217.49.162 (talk) 16:08, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

And now we've even reached the "Twenty hundreds", a phrasing that I believe is quite recent... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:19, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps not as recent as one might suppose, as various Science Fiction writers (and others) were writing about this century for many decades before it started, and had to call it something.

Peripherally, I am reminded of having once read that Arthur C. Clarke thought of his film-and-novel collaboration with Stanley Kubick as "Twenty-oh-one: A Space Odyssey", and was surprised when a preference for "Two thousand and one" emerged. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.209.235.54 (talk) 18:33, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't recall hearing "twenty hundreds" in the wild. Individual years starting with 2011 at the latest are "twenty-eleven" etc, and to some extent this has been backported to the previous decade (2006 might be "twenty-oh-six" now, but was "two thousand (and) six" at the time). The century, to the extent people talk about it, is "the 21st century", though of course technically that differs from the twenty-hundreds by one year on each end. --Trovatore (talk) 18:23, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Here are some references to this kind of construction in Old English: [1]. There's an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see [2]) "Þæt wæs embe .xi. hund wintra ⁊ .x. wintra þes þe heo getimbred was." ("This was about eleven hundred and ten winters after it was built.") So this seems to have been a natural way to form numbers in the thousands and tens of thousands for a long time. I'd ask the question the other way around: When did large number names become systematic with only thousands as the base unit? In formal usage today, "one thousand one hundred", "eleven thousand", and "one hundred ten thousand" are all correct, but "eleven hundred" and "one hundred hundred" are incorrect (or informal). Since when? And where did the rule come from? --Amble (talk) 21:08, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

This previous thread discusses at length the difference between British and American English in spoken numbers over 2,000. Alansplodge (talk) 21:50, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

There's something parallel in British English (I don't know how it would translate to U S English or other languages). The film name 101 Dalmations is spoken "A hundred and one Dalmations", but the bus route between Beckton and Wanstead is spoken "route one-oh-one". Similar with telephone numbers, although "zero" may be more prominent. In arithmetic, "nought" is the preferred word for the "0" symbol before the decimal point (my mother chided me for using this word in a telephone number spoken over the phone to an elderly, rather deaf man, as "it sounds like four." In the 24-hour clock the leading zero in the hours 00-09 is "oh", and for the minutes 01-09 is the same, although "00" is "hundred" (I heard "oh-oh" for "hundred" on one occasion). 2A02:C7C:365E:E700:18D:B732:4EE4:44CB (talk) 11:57, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

U.S. English is similar, we're more likely to read the number as "One hundred and one" when using the number as a count of something, and more likely to read the individual digits (as "one-oh-one" or "one-zero-one") when using the number as a label of something. It would be weird to hear of "Bus Route One Hundred And One" or conversely "I counted the number of M&Ms in the bag, and got one-oh-one". --Jayron32 13:35, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

See also Names for the number 0 in English. Alansplodge (talk) 10:52, 26 May 2022 (UTC)